


Domina

by Island_of_Reil



Series: Fidelis [3]
Category: The Eagle of the Ninth - Rosemary Sutcliff
Genre: Child Death, Childbirth, Community - Freeform, Implied/Referenced Flogging, Implied/Referenced Slavery, Infidelity, Inheritance, Mentor/Protégé, Mentors, Multi, OT3, Original Character Death(s), Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-29
Updated: 2014-03-29
Packaged: 2018-01-17 11:31:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 47,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1386067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“You shall suffer great griefs, griefs I cannot spare you, but you shall also taste great joys. And all shall know you, and one day remember you: mother, trader, teacher, leader.”</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Domina

_Martius_  
 _Anno Primo_  
 _129 CE_

Cottia had been waiting for the sound of his whistle, and when she heard it she stepped through the gap in the fruit-trees. This day was warmer and calmer than the last, the first day she had seen Marcus in nearly a year. She wouldn’t keep her mantle on after a few hours, she thought.

He sat at the right edge of the bench, bad leg splayed out to the side of it, cloak spread on the marble beneath him. She was glad to see the curves of a smile softening his sharp features, partly for how it warmed her, partly for giving her eyes an anchor other than the hollow of his collarbone. Or the outline of his good thigh within his braccae.

“Do you come sit by me, _dulcis_ ,” he said. She flushed slightly before moving to sit herself a few inches to his left, facing him. He gently took her right hand in his.

“Cottia… I’ve been giving thought to how we should all begin this new venture, and you in particular. I know you have horse-breeding in your veins. Have you been trained in any other sort of labours?”

“I…” She bit her lip. “I can spin, of course, and I can sew. Before I came to Calleva, I did tend to my father’s horses and our other animals somewhat, and I helped my mother to cook and clean and otherwise tend the household.”

“Well, that’s a good start,” Marcus said, smiling. “I was thinking, though, that perhaps you might wish to learn more, at the feet of one who knows her business. Esca got word of a lady whose husband has a sizable villa on the Downs. She runs it well, he was told, with the help of a complement of girls; she is something of a local patroness, it seems. She’d be willing to take you in and tutor you in all manner of farm-work for room and board and, if you learn quickly, perhaps a bit of spending money.”

“You will send me away?” she asked plaintively, unable to strike the right note of indignation with her throat closing up on her.

The dark eyes widened under the straight black brows. “Oh, Cottia, no! You won’t be far from where our own villa will stand — five miles, perhaps? And I would hope you’ll travel those miles often to inspect the progress Esca and I make throughout the summer. By harvest-time, I should think, you’ll rejoin us for good.”

“That is five miles further than I wish to be!” she cried, the indignation now easily summoned. “I do not wish to live in yet another stranger’s house!”

He blinked for a moment, then closed his eyes. “Ah… I understand.”

A fragile hope trembled in her chest. “So you won’t send me away, then?”

His eyes were open again, and his smile soft. “As willing and able as you may be to sleep on the ground next to us and cook over an open fire… beyond that, what would you _do_ , Cottia, with no house, no ability to help us with our tasks? You’d be as bored as ever you were in your uncle and aunt’s house.”

Na, _I won’t, for I shall have you to watch,_ she thought, but bit her tongue on the thought, especially before she could begin to picture Marcus shedding his tunic to work in the swelter of summer. She could see the sense in what he said. She still felt aggrieved, but she knew it was not reasonable.

“Have I convinced you?” he said, softly but with a note of humour.

She nodded, her eyes downcast. He squeezed her hand, still in both of his, gently. Then he loosed one hand, which found its way across her shoulders. She gave a start, and her heart began to thump.

“Would that I hadn’t brought such a woebegone look to your face,” he said quietly. His other hand dropped hers and sought her face, lifting her head with gentle fingers under her jaw. Of a sudden she realised how close his face was to her own. Her mouth fell open — stupidly, she thought, but he flushed to see it, and then he was leaning toward her.

At Aquae Sulis in winter, two young men had courted her, first one and then the other. Neither had captured her heart, neither had enticed her to risk her reputation with more than a kiss. But they were pretty enough to distract her from Marcus being gone — gone for good, for all she knew. After the first contemplation of how wet it all was, how odd it felt to have the thick mass of another’s tongue slide into her mouth, the annoyance of having to keep plucking arrant hands from her breast and thigh and arse, she discovered she rather liked to be kissed, and, what’s more, to kiss back in return. Would Marcus think her too forward if she did not pretend to utter innocence still, if she tangled one hand into the mass of his dark hair, ran the other lightly up and down his arm and felt the hard muscles jump beneath, caressed the inside of his mouth with her own tongue…?

Apparently not. Goose-flesh rose on his neck and throat. He broke away from her mouth slightly to emit a soft, tremulous “ _Oh_ …”, and the sound… _did_ things to her, made the inside of her belly twist like it did when she lay in bed at night and thought of him and sometimes let her hand stray between her thighs—

She gave a soft cry of surprise when he pulled her up to sit atop his left thigh. Then he raised his head again, and she dipped her own to recapture his lips. Her mantle was on the cold ground somewhere now. Her breasts burned beneath her stola and undertunic, their nipples fiery, and she pressed them against his throat and chest as if he were cool water. He bent and brushed his head against the curve of her left breast, mouthing the little peak under the fabric, and she could feel him against her thigh, hard and swollen, moving against her—

He stopped, caught a ragged breath, and gently slid her off him and back onto the bench.

“Marcus—” Her voice sounded strange in her own ears, low-pitched and thick like honey.

“No.” He was still panting, and his eyes were almost black now, but his back was straightening again, soldier-like. “Not here, not now. I have not yet even found a ring for you.”

“What difference does it make? I am yours, and you are mine, and I don’t give two pins about the ring.” She reached out to caress his face, but he caught her hand in his again. It took will on his part, she saw, to resist her. She wanted nothing more than to pull him down onto her mantle and erode every last bit of that will.

“Because I am not going to tumble you like a common whore on the ground, and not in my uncle’s garden at that!” he said sharply.

Everything inside her went cold, but her face went hot.

“I didn’t realize you wanted a proper Roman maiden after all.”

He flinched, and he closed his eyes again. She wasn’t sure if he were exasperated with her, or with himself.

“Cottia — no. I did not say that as a rebuke to you. Father of Light, any man should delight to take such a passionate girl to wife!” He grinned of a sudden, and though she wanted to remain angry at him, she found herself smiling in response.

“But this is not the place — even if Uncle Aquila would react with no more than a wink and a grin at me — and this is not the time. Do you _want_ to be gleaning the fields at summer’s end with a heavy belly?”

She chuckled. Other Roman men never spoke to her like she had a brain in her head. Marcus had always spoken to her of interesting things. She wondered how he would speak to her once they were wed.

“It shall be a long six months,” she said ruefully, but with a wider smile now.

He smiled back. “Indeed, it will. But it will pass quickly.”

_Iunius_  
 _Anno Primo_  
 _129 CE_

“Cottia!” As she re-entered the house the slap landed on her forearm, but only because her head towered above Constantia’s reach. “The bread is _burning_ , girl! Can’t you smell it?”

“I was _trying_ to do as much in the garden as I could before I came back to the oven!” Cottia replied tetchily, resisting the impulse to rub her arm. Her new mistress had a hard hand when she was displeased. She knew she was compounding a poor excuse with a sullen reply, but one of the many things she was still mastering was the biting of her tongue.

“What you were ‘trying’ to do doesn’t put anything but blackened bread on the table, does it?” Constantia’s brown eyes were narrow, her lips tight.

Cottia sighed. Letting the resentment go and making an apology did not come naturally to her, but it would be the easiest path to take.

“No. It doesn’t. I am sorry, _domina_. I will keep better track of the time when next I bake.”

She passed through the atrium down the hallway to the vast kitchen, recoiling at the solid wave of heat rolling out of it. The villa was large enough to justify an oven of its own; some of its income came from the selling of bread. There would be less of it to sell today. Red-faced and sweating, she hauled loaf by loaf out of the bricks on the long spatula and lay them on the table.

“Not as bad as I feared,” Constantia said from the doorway. “All look at least salvageable, I daresay. Of course they’ll need the ash trimmed from them. And what else, Cottia?” She seemed entirely unaffected by the heat, even while Cottia’s very hair was trying to escape the kitchen, or at least her braids, strand by frizzled strand. Cottia wondered if it were Roman blood that let her mistress stand in the heat looking as cool as a marble statue.

“Moistened a bit, _domina_?”

“Yes, and what shall we do with that which water will not fix?”

“Make crumbs of it, _domina_ , and save the ash for making _sapo_.”

“Yes.” This time the slap on her arm was light and approving. “I may make a mistress of a villa out of you yet. Don’t make me revise this opinion in the next few hours.”

“No, _domina_.”

Constantia drifted straight-backed out of the kitchen. Cottia took up a knife and began to trim the blackened edges from the loaves. She didn’t hear Deieda come in, and so she nearly took her own fingertip off when the cheerful voice said quietly, “It’s a good thing she likes you quite a bit.”

Cottia expelled her breath and said, with cross sarcasm, “Oh, _obviously_. She must have a taste for hard bread with knife-marks in the crust.”

“ _Na_ , she does,” Deieda said. She was even taller than Cottia and broad-shouldered with it; she leant her imposing frame against the kitchen wall. “She is vexed when you make foolish mistakes because she knows you can do better. Which, I’d say, you are coming to do. You’ve been here, what, a month? You’re stuffing your head full of all sorts of things that other girls learned at their mothers’ knees, or should have. Some of the lackwits she takes in can’t remember to rinse and pick ants from cabbage.”

“There’s a high standard to measure myself against,” Cottia muttered.

Deieda snorted and gave her a friendly clout on the shoulder. “When you’ve cleared the loaves from the table, I’ll bring in and lay down some malt for roasting, and we can brew it later. I like your sense of herbs to add to the mash; I’ll enjoy sampling the brew you flavoured last week. If we’ve the time we’ll brew some mead.”

“Mead!” Cottia’s head lifted. She had not had it in years, not since the clan gatherings of her childhood, while her father still lived. It was too “barbarian” a drink for Valaria and Kaeso.

Deieda flashed her a grin with a few gaps in it. “Is _that_ all it takes to get your attention?”

Cottia grinned back and gave the bigger woman’s arm a playful shove. “You, who can outdrink any five given men, have the gall to ask me that?”

“ _Sa_ , like you’ve not an elbow of lead yourself, girl.” Deieda returned the shove. Cottia staggered a little bit under the force, her grin breaking into laughter.

_Iulius_  
 _Anno Primo_  
 _129 CE_

Cita’s hooves, echoing through the sounds of saws and hammers, brought one of the young hired boys around to the front of the house. Recognizing Cottia, he grinned, then ran toward a rear-lying outbuilding. “ _Domine!_ Esca!” Both of them strode into view a few moments later, dark-russet hair a full head above blue-black hair, Cub at Marcus’s heels with tongue lolling.

Marcus caught sight of her astride Cita and broke into the wide smile that always lifted her heart and the corners of her own mouth. She slid from the saddle very nearly into his waiting arms, and he kissed her lips warmly if circumspectly. Cub brushed against her knee, and her hand absently dropped to scratch his head. Esca stood a short distance away from them with a reserved smile.

“Do you bring us another fine meal, _dulcis_?”

“I do!” She grinned. He was already peering into the basket fixed to Cita.

“Smoked meat? Your handiwork?”

“Not that, no.” She dug in, fetched out something round and solid, then — on a sudden whim — called out, “Esca! Catch.”

His hand had risen before she had finished speaking, and the missile flew snugly into his palm. This time his smile was warmer.

“You’ve learnt cheese-making from your new mistress, Cottia?”

“I _learn_ it, Esca; I’m not quite ready to be turning cheeses out yet. The bread in the basket is mine, though. And this? This I made, too.”

A small jug appeared in her hand, and she offered it to Marcus. He took a sip and screwed up his face. She pulled an exaggerated pout, hoping it would mask her actual disappointment.

“You don’t like it?”

“Barley-beer? A wretched barbarian beverage. I’d sooner drink fresh piss from a stoat,” he declaimed loudly, catching Esca’s eye deliberately. “Let Esca have it; he’ll enjoy it.”

Esca grinned. “Everything fine in life is wasted on Romans. Hand it over, Marcus.”

Marcus passed the jug along, and Esca took a generous pull. When he lowered it, his eyes were slightly wider.

“Becoming a brewster, are you?

“I am, I suppose,” she said, her chin coming up a bit.

“You’ve not made a bad job of this, truth be told.”

She’d hoped Marcus would drink it and praise it. Esca’s praise, she hadn’t expected, and it occurred to her that a fellow Briton’s opinion on the matter was perhaps of more import than a Roman’s. “Thank you,” she said.

The courtyard, bounded on three sides by the house-timbers, was full of workmen, so they sat on the ground before the house with their legs folded or drawn up and ate, raising their voices now and again over the din of the work. Marcus had a boy bring him some watered wine, leaving Esca and Cottia to pass the jug between the two of them. Cub sprawled a short distance from them, eyeing their meal covetously but knowing better than to beg for any of it.

The house was coming along well, Marcus said. The timbers now limned what would be an atrium, a wing of rooms to its left, and a kitchen and triclinium at back. Someday, a wing to the right would enclose the courtyard. Off beyond the house-site was a shelter for two horses and a small supply of hay.

They talked of crops, too. Marcus recalled a fair amount of farm-craft from his boyhood. Some of it, of course, didn’t apply in this colder clime. But the things he didn’t know were reasonably common knowledge among Britons, even those such as Esca who had not been born to the plough.

“Three fields,” Marcus said. “One for wheat, one for beans, one to lie fallow. Alternating year to year, to let the soil replenish itself. We’ve a few damson and walnut trees, too. With the house-building we’ve had no time to plant greens; we’ll leave those to you next year, Cottia.”

“What of livestock?” she asked around a mouthful of cheese and bread.

“Where are we to keep them now? Under the hooves of the horses?” Esca grinned. “I suppose that’s one way to soften old mutton… but, _na_ , we’ll be lucky to get a proper barn up by first snowfall.”

“Oh, we’ll have the barn up by then,” Marcus said, flint in his voice of a sudden. Esca lifted his head to regard him with an exceedingly neutral expression.

“I would not have you tax your leg in a mad race to finish this labour,” Cottia said, frowning slightly.

“My leg is fine,” Marcus said, his tone milder yet still quite firm. “I am not walking thousands of paces or sparring with enemies — or sleeping in icy streams. I can kneel or sit or lean on a wall for much of what I do here.”

She looked over to Esca, who shrugged and said, “True enough. How fare you with your new mistress, Cottia? If nothing else, you seem to be learning apace.”

“I am,” she said, washing down the last of her meal with a pull from the jug. “It is not always easy, but I am glad you and Marcus sent me there. I feel so much less ignorant and useless than I did when I first came to Constantia. And it’s better than mouldering in that house in Calleva,” she said with feeling.

Then she paused, looked up. “Marcus, think you I might have bee-skeps in the spring?”

He looked startled. “You wish to handle bees yourself?”

“ _Sa_ , I’m learning to tend them from an old freedman who’s been with Constantia and Aëtius for years. I would have fresh honey — and I would try my hand at mead.”

He frowned. “Mead?”

“Spirits made of honey,” Esca said. His head had risen and he was regarding Cottia again with surprise. “You don’t fear them swarming you?”

“ _Na_ , if Chrestus gives me some of his bees for a new skep, they shall be used to people anyway. They know my taste, at that.” She brandished her bare right forearm; it bore three small red marks in different stages of fading. “I can’t say I enjoyed getting these, but an occasional sting is a small price to pay for the honey. And bees are fascinating little things!” she said, a note of excitement in her voice. “The skep is like a little city, in its own way. Lots and lots of slaves, in service to an empress. And—”

She broke off, flushing. She was speaking with delight of slaves before one who had once been bought and sold.

Marcus looked baffled. Esca gave her a crooked smile. She was relieved that he had taken no hurt from her words — and then he spoke.

“The empress’s loyal cohort of... stallions, prepared to… die in her service?”

“Well, yes,” she said. Her face was crimson now. _But it’s as much as I deserve_ , she thought, _and better to be teased than to give pain_.

“If you wish to have bees,” Marcus cut in, his own face seemingly darker than usual, “you shall have bees.” He had been staring down into his wine-cup, now he looked up at her. “A fair distance from the house, though,” he said warningly.

“Well, of course,” she said.

“There’s a little hollow to the south, almost to the stream,” Esca said. “It’s sunny, with a great deal of clover. It would be a good place for the skeps.”

Cottia looked up at him, her embarrassment forgotten. “Might I see it?”

“Walk her down there, Esca,” Marcus said. “I should go speak with the head workman before he disappears for his own mid-day meal.”

Though Esca was taller than Cottia, she kept adequate stride with him through the grass and the wildflowers. She seldom had the opportunity to stroll about Aëtius’s land; though she hardly wanted for exertion these days, she realised it was something she missed, the green rustling about her feet and the breeze on her cheeks and the sun kissing the top of her head.

“Here,” Esca finally said, at a spot where the land dipped like a flat-bottomed ladle. The few small stripling trees it bore did not block out the sun, which bathed the hollow in noon-day brightness. The grass was thick with clover; the bees would like it, but some of it could be uprooted to make way for, say, thyme-cuttings from Constantia’s herb-garden. Beyond the hollow, the land rose again, and she could see the wide silver band of the stream beyond the rise, flickering with the rise and fall of wading-birds among the reeds.

Cottia stood and gazed at the hollow for a while. Three skeps, side by side.

“Does this meet your requirements, _domina_?”

She startled a bit at Esca’s voice, and at the term of address. He had never been her slave, only Marcus’s, and that was long past now. But when she turned to him, she caught the hint of a smile, and she returned it.

“I believe it does,” she said.

_Nonae, Iulius_  
 _Anno Primo_  
 _129 CE_

After the evening meal, the girls and women gathered in the huge atrium of the villa to spin and sew. It was Cottia’s favourite time of day: Even in the hottest weather, the air there was then cool and pleasant, and she could turn her hand to tasks that were long familiar to her.

On one exceptionally warm night she nestled into a couch alongside and opposite the faces that had grown familiar. Constantia’s closest friend and confidante Bellicia, sweet-natured, with a round, pleasant visage. Deieda, big and stolidly cheerful. Sulia, an older widow with a long white braid down her back and a perpetually veiled expression. Quiet and observant Ffion, black hair and eyes against white skin and delicate features. Lush, sly Angharad, not a hired girl but wife to Lucanus, the _procurator Augusti_ ; they were neighbours to Aëtius. Other hired girls, other neighbours. A panoply of young girls, including Constantia’s oldest, Aëtia, a girl of seven years.

This night, Constantia sat not as usual beside Bellicia but beside Cottia, who was at the end of the couch. Constantia leant in a bit and lifted her head to Cottia’s ear; her voice was low so that it would not carry, but as always her tone was firm.

“Your betrothed and his companion will have finished the villa-house by harvest’s end,” she said. “Have plans been made for your wedding?”

Cottia gave a start, driving a needle into her finger, and cursed. Someone elsewhere in the atrium made a jest; voices rose in laughter.

“None,” she admitted, with embarrassment. “My aunt has said little about it, perhaps because I haven’t much of a dowry.”

Constantia’s hand covered hers. “I do not think Marcus Flavius Aquila expects a great dowry from you, just the skills you have learned and an eagerness to make use of them. If you have not yet chosen a _pronuba_ , Cottia, I will gladly serve as one.”

Cottia’s eyes widened. “I am honoured,” she said simply.

Constantia squeezed her hand. “You would not be the first girl for whom I was such. And the honour is mine, mine and Aëtius’s. You are to wed a man who is already great at so young an age, a living legend of Rome. You have no Roman blood, but it would surprise me not if you were descended from one of the warrior-queens of old, the way you acquit yourself. I have never taught such a fine pupil before — burnt bread and the like notwithstanding,” she said drily, making Cottia’s mouth twitch. “You will make a fine _materfamilias_ and a fine _domina_ — and a fine hostess, which will stand me in good stead when I visit you to see how you fare in your own household. Which I intend to do often.”

_Augustus_  
 _Anno Primo_  
 _129 CE_

Valaria and Kaeso had indeed offered nothing for either a dowry or a wedding. But, Marcus said, when they got word that Cottia’s _pronuba_ was volunteering her house for the ceremony and banquet, their tune changed rather quickly.

“They came fuming to my uncle,” Marcus said with barely suppressed laughter. They were alone in Constantia’s peristylium; he had ridden out to the great villa alone to speak to her. She had not seen him and Esca in a while: Between the harvest, the building of the villa, and the planning of the wedding, moments of idle time were few and far between.

“ _Did_ they, now?” Cottia said, one brow arched.

“Oh, _yes_.” Marcus smirked. “Your aunt was especially in a fluster. They demanded that their own house should be so used.”

“And what did your uncle tell them?”

“He graciously forebore to mention that their house was a bit small for that. Or that they _could_ choose, if not to provide you with an actual dowry, to augment somewhat the few tangible goods you’ll bring to the villa. Not that I care overly much about that,” he hastened to add, covering Cottia’s hand with his own.

“But he did point out quite reasonably that a wedding _processio_ from Calleva to the Downs would be ridiculous. How did they expect a train of exhausted, footsore, half-drunken celebrants to make merry at the end of it?” Marcus drew himself up higher and deepened his deep voice even more in imitation of his uncle. “‘It will be taxing enough for the bridegroom; did you forget he has a bad leg? Or that he will need all his strength for the night ahead of him?’ He told me,” Marcus said in his normal voice, “your aunt turned six shades of crimson at that.” His grin was wicked. Cottia clapped a hand over her mouth to muffle an explosive laugh.

“However!” Marcus held up one finger like an orator at the Senate. “There will be a diplomatic resolution. Your mistress, I am told, will invite Valaria to come here and, _in loco matris_ , dress, coif, and veil you the day of the wedding.”

Cottia’s smile vanished. “Oh, Lady Andred. She will make me crawl out of my skin with nerves. I’ll need an amphora of wine to get me through the ceremony.”

It didn’t quite come to that, but on the day of the wedding Cottia did find herself silently cursing old Aquila as Valaria fussed and fidgeted about her chair. She had painted Cottia’s cheeks, eyes, and lips capably enough, Cottia admitted, but the way she wielded the spear-head made Cottia fear there would be blood-stains on her _flammeum_.

“Aah! Are you trying to part my hair, aunt, or my scalp?” she exclaimed in pain, ducking her head and clasping a hand to the top of it.

“If you’d hold still and stop fidgeting I could do the job properly,” Valaria snapped.

“Valaria,” Constantia said in a neutral tone. “Perhaps you should give me that, and I’ll finish for you. Why don’t you join the guests in the atrium and ask one of my girls for some wine. You’ve done quite well here and have amply earned a respite.”

It was not phrased as an order, but an order it was. Valaria flushed, handed the spear-head to Constantia, and strode out of the chamber stiff-shouldered.

Cottia expelled a breath. “Thank you,” she said quietly.

“It is no worry,” came the reply. “My duties to you as _pronuba_ include the preservation of your wits.”

The spear-tip now moved through Cottia’s hair with surprising gentleness. She stopped fingering the woollen belt about her _tunica recta_ and worrying at the Knot of Hercules. There were six tugs, three on either side of her head, as Constantia bound each lock, then six mild scrapes as each was pinned up with a fillet so that together they formed a cone shape.

Constantia picked up the _flammeum_ , brighter even than Cottia’s hair. Cottia felt the light fabric drape over her piled hair and cascade to her shoulders. Then it tightened around the sides of her head as Constantia wound a wreath of blackthorn blossoms about it.

“Beautiful,” Constantia said as if daring someone to gainsay her.

“Indeed,” said a voice from the doorway. The round, freckled face to be seen there was usually a pleasant one; today it positively glowed with affection.

“ _Ave_ , Bellicia,” Constantia said. “I believe it’s time.”

“It is,” Bellicia replied. “Everyone has gathered. Cottia?”

Cottia’s stomach fluttered with a jolt of excitement. She rose, touching to the floor slippers dyed the same colour as the veil, and she took the arm Bellicia proffered her.

When they appeared in the atrium, a soft murmur went up from the guests massed by the outer doors.

Cottia flicked her eyes over them, faces familiar and unfamiliar. Then to the witnesses. Kaeso, thick-bodied and now smiling benevolently. Lucanus, elegant and sharp-eyed, all professional gravity. Bellicia’s husband Gavo, with his handsome boyish face. Aëtius, old enough to be father to his wife, usually jovial face gone solemn. Esca, who wore a toga unexpectedly well, notwithstanding the incongruous blue swirls of ink peering out from under one sleeve.

And Marcus, so dark in his pure white toga, blackthorn wreath bright against his hair, brows high above eyes that seemed to see no-one but her in the atrium.

They began to move, all of them, into place, as if set in motion by the gods.

Lucanus held out a tablet in each hand, the marriage contract they had pored over and signed in this atrium a month before. Marcus took one, Cottia the other. As they exchanged them, their hands brushed, and Cottia shivered.

They handed them back to Lucanus for the moment, for the _nummus_ was now in Esca’s hand. His expression was unreadable as he passed the small coin to Marcus; Marcus’s was reverent as he proffered it to Kaeso, who took it. _I’m sure you wish you could have got more than that in exchange for me_ , Cottia thought, a brief flicker of resentment that rose up through her joy, then evaporated as she saw Esca place something else into Marcus’s left hand.

Then her own left hand was being lifted in Marcus’s right. The iron band slid neatly down over her third finger, from which the vein of love ran back toward her heart.

Clasping her beringed hand, he led her to the altar. Five tall beeswax tapers burned before the _di penates_. Esca, at Marcus’s other side, handed him a third and final thing: a rust-red Samian cup, gorgeously engraved around the perimeter. Marcus tipped it forward, and the libation — not simply Falernian, but _Faustian_ Falernian, he told her later — splashed gently onto the altar.

He did not sacrifice the entirely of the drink to the household gods. He took a long, dignified sip, then turned to Cottia, cup held out. Softly he asked, “Share my cup, _uxor mea_?”

It shook in her hands, and she was glad the wine no longer neared the rim. She took a long draught, eyes widening; she had never had such good wine in her life.

And then he touched his wine-wet lips to hers, and the cheering that went up pricked her eyes with tears.

 

Though the banquet was not hurried, to Cottia it was a blur of laughter, music, smiling faces, kisses on her cheeks, hands pressing hers, loving embraces. She had only ever seen more people in one place at clan gatherings. A wedding was a great event, and to host one successfully did the host and hostess great honour. The more guests and the greater the generosity shown them, the greater the honour.

Cottia knew this benefit that Constantia and Aëtius reaped from their hospitality, yet even so her jaw dropped at the lavishness of the feast laid out for them all. Marcus certainly hadn’t the coin to afford even a fifth of it, and she doubted that Kaeso and Valaria had defrayed the cost by even a _sesterce_. No dormouse or peacock, to be sure, or any other extravagances for which Roman banquets were notorious. But there were beef and goose, boar and fish; and with them garden-greens and mushrooms and a broad-bean soup and olives shipped from nations south and east of Rome.

After the savoury courses there were sweets made of fruits from the same hot lands, beaten and dried and pressed into little squares. There was the light, airy pudding the Romans called _savillum_ , and the wine-sweetened Greek biscuits called _glykinai_. But most of the dessert bounty was British: medlars and apples and cherries and figs; almonds and chestnuts and walnuts and hazelnuts; cheese of half a dozen kinds; and the piercingly sweet honey of Chrestus’s skeps to drizzle over all of it.

And there was wine, _so_ much wine, to wash it all down. Not much of it was Falernian, and none of _that_ Faustian, but all of it was good, and so was the mead Deieda had put up, and the barley-beer Cottia herself had by now mastered.

It was all fine fuel, in bellies and in spirits, for the _processio_ to her new home.

In Constantia’s doorway, Cottia clutched half-heartedly at Valaria’s arms, letting Marcus tear her in one movement from them. A whoop of mock-scornful laughter went up from those who would soon be walking behind them, and he growled in her ear, “Where is my Iceni warrior tonight? That was too easily done!”

She could barely get the discreet rejoinder out over her own laughter. “Forgive me, _mi viro_ , if I can barely muster any grief at being shut of that house for good!”

“‘ _Mi viro_ ,’” he repeated, his voice still a low growl but with a velvet softness to it. “I like the sound of that... _uxor mea_.”

She had drunk enough wine that, rather than carry her spinning-basket in her arms with the dignity befitting a young matron, she decided to bear it on her head instead. Lifting it there elicited raucous laughter from behind her and even some applause, as well as a grin from Marcus.

“How shall we hold your arms now, _domina_?” chided a piping voice to her left. He and the boy on her right were Constantia’s little twins, Drusus and Fabius.

“Hold onto my tunic, then!” she exclaimed. Each of them obediently took up a fold of muslin. She didn’t know the name of the slightly older boy who walked beside her with the vase of household items and little carven toys. Before her proudly strode Bellicia and Gavo’s son Carantinos, bearing high the hawthorn torch that had been lit at Constantia’s hearth.

Walnuts landed continually at their feet as they walked. When one pelted her in the back, she turned round, took her spindle from her basket, and waved it menacingly in the direction whence the nut flew. The _processio_ , which had swollen greatly with passers-by and well-wishers since they’d left Constantia’s villa, hooted with delight. Flute-notes skirled around them, and someone began to sing the _Thalassio_ :

_Age tibicen: dum illam educant huc novam nuptam foras,_  
 _Suavi cantu concelebra onmen hanc plateam hymeneaeo!_

The verses grew bawdier as they walked. Cottia howled at the ones she’d heard before, nearly cried at the ones she hadn’t, then turned to see Marcus’s face — dull red under his olive skin — and feared she would now piss her virginal-white tunic _._

“You must have sung worse than that when you led your century, Marcus!”

“Oh, I did,” he assured her, “but no innocent young maidens marched beside me!”

Though he was laughing, too, he seemed profoundly relieved when they reached the halfway point, where the _processio_ separated into men and women. The men would follow him to the villa, where he would make ready to welcome Cottia; the women would follow her.

“Lead your men on, O Centurion of the Bed-chamber!” a bright, strong voice went up from his party, and the ensuing roars of laughter could have rent the night sky. It was a voice she recognised: Esca was drunk enough to make the jest but sober enough to call it out clearly. She’d have wagered he found Marcus’s crimson face as amusing as she did.

The men and boys, all except Carantinos, turned and hastened to the new villa, running, walking, or stumbling as fast as they all could. The women and girls behind Cottia continued to sing, crass _fescennina_ alternating with earnest, sweet _epithalamia_.

They walked and walked in the dark, merriment entwining with reverence, a river of torch-light glittering off finery and raised feminine voices, until Carantinos turned to Cottia with a broad, broad grin.

“We are here, _domina_!”

She looked up, and she gasped, and she fought the urge to drop to her knees.

She had not been here in the last six weeks, so busy had she been with the wedding plans and the harvest. In that time she had seen Marcus on only two occasions and Esca on but one of those, as they and the hired lads had been racing to finish the main house. They had not raced in vain, but neither had they rushed blindly and foolishly.

It was modest, much smaller than the villa she had just left; only a bath-house and the lean-to for the horses kept it company for now. But it was rugged native lime-stone, the fine masonry complemented with cleverly carpentered timbers about the windows, the roof laid with the curved _imbrices_ that looked like waves upon an ocean of black ink. For now there was space for the three of them, and Cub, and for at least a few of the children who, please the gods, would come someday.

The door was a riot of flower-garlands; she knew they’d been made for her by the younger girls in Constantia’s employ. She walked up to it, Gavo and Kaeso hovering nearby to seize her lest she attempt to enter on her own. But she merely put her basket down, taking from it two skeins of wool, which she twined round the doorposts. Then she took out a tiny vial of lard — she could not bear to use wolf’s fat, for Cub’s sake — and anointed the posts.

The door opened before her. The male well-wishers who had joined them on the road had departed; the atrium was full of the other boys and men, and before them all was Marcus, who looked for a moment too overcome to speak. In his one hand was a lit torch, in his other a bowl of water.

There was a yelp of joy behind him somewhere. The mood broke at that, men chuckling and boys roaring as Esca took Cub by the scruff and hauled him out of the atrium. Within a few moments he returned alone, and all was again restrained excitement.

It was the turn of the female well-wishers to vanish into the night. Cottia and Marcus stood to the side to let the women and girls they knew enter the house. Then Gavo and Kaeso knelt, one on either side of Cottia, and made a chair of their arms. Picking up her basket up again, she sat, and they carried her across the threshold into her new house.

They set her on her feet before the hearth, before Marcus. Amid the hush, she put the basket down a second time. Marcus held the torch and the bowl up before her like a high priest making an offering. She touched the fingertips of one hand to the nimbus around the flame, pulling away quickly before she could be burnt. She dipped the other hand into the bowl and brought it up dripping.

Marcus handed both to Gavo and laid his hands on Cottia’s face. They trembled slightly.

“ _Dulcis_. Do you tell me your _praenomen_.”

Even had she been Roman, she would have had no _praenomen_ ; it was for men alone. She made the reply Constantia had carefully taught her: _“Ubi tu Caius, ego Caia.”_

_Wherever and whenever you are Caius, I am there and then Caia._

She took the torch from Gavo, turned to the hearth, and lit the kindling in it. Then she blew the torch out in one breath — wondering that the wine-fumes didn’t fan the flames instead — and, with a sudden grin, tossed it over her right shoulder to the guests. The reverent tension broke a second time under the mad scramble.

Amid the renewed gaiety, she was led to a chair draped in sheepskin. Marcus, smiling foolishly above her, pressed a ring of keys into her hands. She wondered how many of them unlocked anything yet, and how many had been added for the sake of ritual.

The only fare was fruit, nuts, and one kind of cheese, with more honey, but even after the five-mile _processio_ few had the belly to do more than pick at it. The wine, on the other hand, did not go neglected.

The earlier songs of the _processio_ had been suggestive; the graphic _fescennina_ had been held in reserve until the sexes parted company. But now the guests — _her_ guests, now!, men and women alike — regaled her with the same _fescennina_ and worse. She laughed through most of them, although one or two verses made her eyebrows climb and her face redden. Out of pity for him, she didn’t watch Marcus’s face the while; she trained her eyes instead on the miniature marriage-bed set in the atrium, with its own panoply of garlands and the little staircase at one end.

Before long, it was time to take all the sung advice to heart. The remaining guests, far gone on wine and eager to see them put to bed, whooped when Marcus picked up Cottia’s hand and smiled at her and murmured “ _Uxor mea_ ” again.

She stared at him straight-faced, eliciting barely suppressed titters from the guests as she made them await her reply. Then she threw up her hands and shouted, “Does _anyone_ here who knows me well expect me to develop a case of the maidenly vapours?” They roared again, even Valaria, whose face was red with wine and happiness against her yellow curls.

“You _will_ let me untie that knot, won’t you?” Marcus said. He was flushed again, but now only with drink and with excitement.

Smiling, she stood, and he knelt at her feet. His hands weren’t as steady as when he was sober, but the Knot of Hercules did not give him quite the difficulty she had feared — or that the guests were obviously hoping for. The _cingulum_ soon fell to the floor, to more shouts of approval and more obscene suggestions.

Marcus stood again, grinning with triumph, and took her hand, leading her down the wing to the left of the atrium to the marriage-chamber, the guests following. The door stood open. The bed and the floor were strewn with yet more flowers and fragrant herbs. Still more of these, and fruits as well, sat or lay on the kist at the foot of the bed. Though the new house had been built with a Roman hypocaust, it was not yet in use; rather, three braziers burned, warming the room and bathing it in soft light.

In the doorway, Kaeso and Valaria came to stand on either side of Cottia. She had chafed under her aunt’s ministrations this morning, she had glared cynically at her uncle during the ceremony, she had not fought Marcus hard when he play-tore her away from Valaria as the evening began. But now she brimmed with wine-fuelled emotions, and she felt a tear run down her cheek. They had taken her in, they had looked after her in their own way, and now they stood where her own mother and father should have.

But, had her father lived, never would she have met Marcus.

The guests did not mock or hoot, now, but stood quietly, a few of them sniffling, as Kaeso and Valaria stepped away from her, and Marcus took her hands in his.

And then Constantia was at her side, for a mercy, and with a hand on the small of Cottia’s back she led her into the chamber and closed the door against renewed shouts and songs and vulgar insinuations.

They knelt on the sweetly strewn floor, where they clasped their hands. The merry-making outside the door seemed to drown in the sudden reverent silence about them. Constantia looked expectantly at Cottia, who belatedly realised that, of course, they did not share gods, and so Constantia could not lead her in prayer. She thought a moment, and then she began.

“Lady Andred, Invincible One. I thank Thee, and I call upon Thee as woman speaking to woman.”

She stopped short. Those were the words of the woman who called on the goddess to help her drive out the Romans. Not to help her welcome one into her bed.

Constantia raised her head and set a brown gimlet eye upon her. “Go on.”

It was an anchor. Cottia drew another breath and continued.

“I supplicate and pray Thee, not in Thy aspect as a warrior, but in Thy aspect as a mother and as a lover. I pray Thee make me a worthy and capable wife to the man who loves me greatly; though he is not of our blood, he has earned the right to call himself our countryman, with his immense courage and his abiding love for the land. I pray Thee help me please him as a woman, that he may never stray from my bed. And I pray Thee open my womb and let me bear his children, as many of them as I can, for as long as I can.”

She looked up at Constantia, and flushed at the fierce pride in the older woman’s eyes.

“Well done. It is as I have said before: a warrior, and a queen.”

She kissed Cottia’s brow, then stood. Cottia rose too, and let herself be sat on the edge of the bed, where Constantia gently unwound the wreath, took off the veil, pulled out the fillets, and shook Cottia’s hair out and down around her shoulders. She removed the jewelry lent to Cottia: Bellicia’s droplets of malachite from Cottia’s ears, and her own circlet of gold from Cottia’s throat.

“Stand again.”

She obeyed. Constantia undid the fibula at her shoulder, and the _tunica recta_ slipped gracefully to the floor. Within its white puddle she toed off her flame-red slippers, and then she felt Constantia’s fingers at her undertunic. And she began to tremble.

The stern face and chestnut-coloured eyes before her softened. “You will be fine,” Constantia whispered. “You have nothing in the world to fear, and everything in the world to eagerly anticipate.” And she kissed Cottia’s brow again.

Naked but for the iron ring, cold of a sudden, Cottia slid gratefully under the rugs piled on the bed and pulled them up to her chin. Constantia stood at the door and gave her one last gaze, full of ferocious approbation, before disappearing through it to shouts of glee on the other side.

Moments passed, unnerving ones. Then the door opened again.

Marcus. Alone, unattended. He shut it behind him and stood at the foot of the bed, regarding his bride with tenderness, desire, and — oddly, she thought — anxiety.

“No Esca? No Gavo?” she asked quietly. The merriment of earlier seemed to elude her, too.

“No,” he said. She had never heard him speak so diffidently. “I wished to come to you alone.”

She didn’t know what to say, or what else to do, so she sat up, letting the rugs slip to her waist, and she held out her hands. His eyes dropped only a moment to her bare breasts, then returned to her face like a compass-needle returns north.

He sat on the bed next to her and shed his shoes. Slowly, solemnly, he took her hands, turning them over in his, entwining his fingers in hers. Then he gently pulled her into his embrace. When he kissed her now, he did not push her away in self-denial when she moaned against his mouth, when she ran her fingers through his hair and made him shiver with their featheriness against his scalp, when her nipple disappeared between his pulling, pressing fingers with their light-scraping nails.

He stood again and undid his fibula, eyes full of dark fire, and he let the toga slip to the floor around him. He was bare beneath.

As she had wished for in the spring, Cottia had since seen him work stripped to the waist in the heat of the summer. She had admired how the muscles snaked under the golden skin of his narrow shoulders and lean arms, the sturdiness of his chest and the ridges of his belly, all smoothly shaven of their fine black hair at the baths. Without timidity, she dropped her eyes and let them wander over the narrow hips, the well-muscled thighs — the right one with its spider’s-web of scars — and the cock that thrust fiercely up from between them.

She reached out, then hesitated and looked up at him. “May I…?”

He could barely get the words out. “Need you even ask?”

She laid her hand on his right hip. He was hers; she wanted to touch… not just his cock, but _him_ , all of him. Her hand slid down over the hard muscle, the smooth pink scar tissue. His body stiffened briefly, and his cock seemed to shrink a little.

“Oh, Marcus,” she whispered. “You are a beautiful man. All of you is beautiful. The marks you bear are the marks of a hero. They, too, are beautiful.”

She leant over and kissed the flesh that had been savaged by the chariot, by surgeons’ knives, by infection. Her hair brushed against the side of his cock, which swelled back to life as he gasped.

Encouraged, she lay her cheek against his scars and began to stroke his cock gently, now and again lowering her hand to caress and cradle the tight, heavy sac beneath it. He trembled and jolted under her fingers, the tension seeming to splinter throughout his body. She knew he desired her, but to make him actually shiver at her touch was another thing entirely. She felt molten inside, aching… _separated_ from him, in a way that had barely surfaced when they embraced in his uncle’s garden.

She looked up into his face again.

“I have prayed to the goddess of my folk to help me please you as best I can. She has heard my prayer, it seems. But She cannot answer it in full unless you show me, Marcus, how and where you best like to be touched and kissed. Will you?”

He drew a deep, shaking breath, and he sat down on the bed again. He pushed the rugs down to her knees, and he lay down beside her, drawing her to him, pressing hard and hot into her thigh.

“I will show you, _dulcis_. And… “ He fixed her eyes with his. “… you shall show me the same, for you.” Firmer than an entreaty, but not so firm as a command.

She nodded. “I will.”

 

The sky through the window was paling to morning when finally they slept.

They did not stir until well into the afternoon, waking ravenous and dry-mouthed. It was with great delight that they found the little table just outside their chamber door, set with much of the fare that their guests had left untouched last night, plus covered dishes of tid-bits from Constantia’s feast. There was also a jug of water, a mixing-bowl, two cups, and an amphora of wine — and the last held the astonishing Faustian Falernian.

“This is Esca’s hand,” Marcus said with a smile as, naked, limp cock swinging in an undignified manner that made her smile, he carried the laden table into their chamber and shut the door again. “He insisted on keeping that last amphora hidden for me — _from_ me, for that matter. He told me that you and I should have the joy of it, not that foul-mouthed pack of baying hounds called our guests — whom, I should add, he encouraged _shamelessly_ in song last night.” He spoke all this with fond amusement as he opened the amphora and filled one of the cups. He drank of it deeply, then handed it to Cottia.

They sated their thirst and their hunger, and then once again they sated each other.

_Autumnus/Hiems_  
 _Anno Primo_  
 _129 CE_

She was not over-fond of winter, but she was grateful to be coming to her new home after harvest-time. She would never lack for things to do here; settling into her new life while the earth slept under cold winds and crisp snow would give her a period of grace, she thought.

After six months of hard, if rewarding, lessons amid the bustle of a large villa, she would remember her first months here as sweet and peaceful. Her new-found skills seemed to rise up and uncoil within her as she walked through the house: She saw what was in place and what needed to be put aright, what sufficed and what lacked, what could remain in store and what should be soon used. She was no heir to Apicius, but she was a serviceable cook, and Marcus and Esca seemed to find the table she set an improvement over their own.

In the kitchen, her kitchen now, she also brewed beer and mead and made cheese. Encouraged by what Esca had said to her in summer, the third week that she went to market she brought rounds of her own cheese and jugs of her own beer along. She was not quite yet a familiar face there, but some of the merchants and mongers recognised her now, and a few of them bought beer and cheese from her. The next week, they bought more, and a few others bought them as well. The week after that, she sold even more. It was a gratifying feeling, to know she could turn a coin as well as spend one.

As winter set in for good, she was selling mead, too, although cheaply, with little profit. She thought ruefully that she had a ways to go before she could turn honey into excellent rather than adequate drink. Taking it fresh from her own bees, she thought, would help immensely.

True to Marcus’s word, a small barn went up before the first snowfall. The black stallion Cornix and the grey mare Procella were moved therein; their former shelter continued to store hay, feed, and the implements of farming. Joining the horses within a few weeks were a cow, a sow and boar, two ewes, and a handful of fowl. Cottia had not spent much time with animals since her father died and her mother sent her to Calleva, and she had missed their wordless companionship. Happily she fed them all, milked the cow, combed the ewes, and checked the hens for eggs. Most happily of all, she curried the horses, a task it took little to convince Esca to leave to her.

Not long after, out of nowhere one day appeared an enormous grey tom-cat who began to root out mice in the barn with deadly skill and great relish. Cottia, marking the swiftness with which he pounced, named him Aeolus. For all his bulk, he wound himself sinuously around her ankles while he buzzed deeply and loudly with approval at how she scratched his head and crooned to him. But on the one occasion she saw Cub poke his nose into the barn, Aeolus caught sight of him. The cat seemed to double in size, and he growled as loudly as any wolf. Cub shrank away whimpering. Cottia was amused. Esca and Marcus would probably not be, she thought, and she said nothing of it to them.

They three were not left in isolation. Constantia kept her promise to Cottia, sometimes bringing Bellicia or Deieda or both in tow, and the three or four of them would spin and mend as they conversed. If it were evening, Aëtius would accompany her instead; he and Marcus found Rome and Etruria rich subjects of conversation. Bellicia’s Gavo was often at their villa too, helping Marcus and Esca with this task or that in the day, sharing wine and beer with them in the evening.

She, too, made her visits back to Constantia’s, where women gathered on most days with their daughters and wee sons to spin and talk, for work went faster that way. Even if she were glad that their company was no longer about her every minute of the day, Cottia realised each time she slipped into the atrium how much she had missed it.

Mostly, though, she was alone with Marcus and Esca. Her husband, whom she often caught looking at her with a foolish smile or longing eyes. His dearest friend, who smiled now with genuine warmth when he caught sight of her.

 

It was just a few months before her courses ceased. Shortly thereafter, mornings brought with them a wretched queasiness.

She said nothing at first. She had known a girl at Constantia’s who had miscarried two babes, one after the other and each before her second month was out. Marcus, who had never spent much time in the company of women, looked to her with some concern when she woke pale and reached first thing for the chamber-pot, but he seemed not to guess what ailed her. Esca did not regard her as closely as Marcus did, and he did not see or hear her be ill in the mornings.

Soon, though, her stolae began to grow tight about her waist. She knew, and she knew it was time to speak of it.

The three of them took their meals together at a table in the triclinium. Marcus had at first objected, wishing to recline instead. Cottia didn’t care for the Roman practise, Esca even less so. She pointed out to Marcus that after meals it would be easier for her to swipe a cloth across a table-top and sweep under the chairs than to attend to several couches and the floor beneath them. They struck a compromise that they would use the couches on the occasions they had guests. He grumbled from time to time that he might as well be back in the mess hall at Isca Dumnoniorum, rather than in his own villa, but he let her have her way in this.

On a cold night in early winter she stood at the table with a serving bowl of stew and a ladle, the floor warm beneath her feet from the hypocaust and the room bathed in the soft yellow light of palm-oil lamps. Marcus smiled up at her and rested his hand on her hip as she served him. Her heart swelled, and she leant down and brushed her lips against his smooth-shaven cheek. He and Esca were in the habit of bathing before supper, she after. He smelt of oil scented with calamus and sea-salt. He gently inclined his head against her kiss and idly wound a stray bright tendril of her hair round his finger.

Men in their cups had begun to sing songs of her husband, she knew, of his ferocity in battle, his fearless journey past the ends of the earth, the restoration of his family’s honour, his devotion to Rome. It wasn’t proper, she knew, but she wished she could sing to the world of his infinite tenderness with her, how his fingers could coax gasps and cries and scalding-hot slickness from her the way they could coax green shoots to unfold from the ground. She wished she could write poems about how Rome was not his sole passion. About how, as she learned his body like he learned hers, she learned how to make his dark eyes darken more, to make him cry out hoarsely — he, who never cried out once under the spiked chariot wheels or the surgeon’s knife — with the gentlest caress of her tongue or the most powerful embrace of intimate muscles. For all his people’s poets wrote of women and their beauty, little had she seen more beautiful in this world than Marcus Flavius Aquila, spent and trembling above her or beneath her — the latter, more often than not, to spare his bad leg strain — seeking her lips with his and unable to say more than, “Oh. _Cottia,_ ” and that only the barest breath.

As she stood by his side at table, her mind shocked her with a sudden wild vision of herself throwing the serving bowl to the floor in one direction and Marcus in another, bringing her weight but especially her hips down on top of him, not much caring that Esca was there.

She made herself straighten and step toward Esca. Heat still swirled in her cheeks as she ladled stew in his bowl. He found something of interest to look at amid the tiles of the floor, a hint of a smile curving his lips.

After they had eaten, Esca rose. “Don’t sit up awake,” he said, smiling more broadly. “I’ll be back late.”

Marcus grinned at him. “Do you never sleep, Esca?”

“Oh, I do, and quite well at that,” Esca said, smile broadening into a grin to match Marcus’s. “ _Where_ I sleep is another matter. A good night to you both.”

When he had left, Marcus turned to Cottia and took both her hand in his, resting them on his thigh. “You are growing sleek, _dulcis_. I do think your new life agrees with you.”

Cottia breathed in deeply. “I… I am growing more than sleek, Marcus.” And she pulled their hands back toward herself, opened his fingers to flatten his palm, laid it on her belly.

For a moment, he merely blinked. Then his eyes widened and his lips parted, and his features broke with joy.

He was out of his chair and on his knees before her, head in her lap, altar of pleasure, font of life. He pressed his smooth-shaven cheek against her belly and closed his eyes tightly; when they opened again, they shone wetly.

She bent and wrapped her arms about his narrow, well-muscled shoulders, burying her face in his thick black hair, moistening it with her own eyes. She couldn’t tell which one of them had begun it, but they found themselves slowly rocking back and forth within each other’s arms, almost imperceptibly, as if the babe were cradled not within her but between them.

That night she rode him hard, gripping his shoulders, bearing down hard. The tiny nexus of pleasure, the sacred and shameful bit of flesh the Romans called _landica_ and only in whispers if at all, slipped back and forth past his pubic bone, over and over. She watched his shining face watch her own; his hands cupped her belly like a grail. They wandered upward to hold the small breasts that were beginning to swell, too, and caressed her widening nipples until they were like arrow-tips. She groaned, leant over to kiss him as her cunt pulled and pulled at him, as if she could draw his entire body into hers.

Of a sudden she went rigid, then began to shake; she moaned low in her throat as she spent. She was still molten inside, eyes unfocused, when his fingertips dug into her burgeoning hips — the marks of them would be there next morning — and he began to thrust upwards into her, rough, fast, wild.

“Spend, Marcus,” she whispered, “spend into me.” It was scarce seconds before an “ _Oh…_ ” of revelation burst from his lips, his seed from his cock. Slowly he eased back down onto the bed, shuddering, chest heaving. As he stilled he drew her down atop him, buried his face in the crook of her neck, traced soft patterns on her flushed skin with his lips.

They did not move apart for a long time, nor did they speak.

_Februarius_  
 _Anno Secundo_  
 _130 CE_

As one of Constantia’s stable-lads helped Cottia down from Procella, her left foot — which she could not see beneath the protrusion of her belly — came down on a slippery patch of ice. She shrieked and clutched at the lad’s arm in a spate of terror. The boy, tall and rawboned at fifteen, held her steady and guided her to less-treacherous, if not precisely dry, ground. He then took her basket off Procella and handed it to her, then walked her into the house.

About twenty women sat before the hearth, spinning, weaving, sewing, mending, talking. Snatches of song rose and fell among them from time to time. Young girls sat beside their mothers, learning to wield the needle and the spindle; Cottia noticed Aëtia at Constantia’s side. Very wee ones of either sex dozed in cradles rocked by their mothers’ feet. Slightly bigger ones crawled about in arcs limited by the strings which bound them to the legs of a great heavy kist against the back wall. Better they occasionally wail in frustration than wander into the fire.

Cottia slipped into place beside Ffion, whose pale face turned upward with a grave and quiet smile of welcome. She exchanged smiles and well-mets with the women she knew, nods of acknowledgement with those she didn’t. As she took up her spindle, she said little. She listened, instead, hearing who else was now with child, what children had been born, who lay ill, who had died. The miller to the north put his thumb on the scales. The Emperor had taken his catamite Antinous to Greece, where the youth had been initiated into the cult of Eleusis, and at last word they were journeying south. The draper in Calleva promised to have fine silks in from Serica when the shipping lanes were clear of ice. The druids and the haruspices said this year’s harvest would be a good one.

“Cottia,” said a woman whose face Cottia recognised but whose name eluded her. “The men of your household are good with horses, _sa_? I’ve a chestnut stallion with sore hooves that needs to be looked to, if they’ve any time for it.” She smiled. “I’ve some figs and olives I can send them home with.”

Cottia returned the smile. “That’s good of you. Esca is the better with the horses; I’ll ask him tonight if he can spare time for you.” She could ask Constantia the woman’s name and where her villa was later on.

“We were speaking of chestnut stallions, were we?”

The murmur, replete with suggestion, had come from Angharad, sitting across from Cottia. The sly curve of her lips echoed the apple-like ones of her cheekbones and the rather more plentiful ones of her breasts and hips. Her blue-black hair spilled to her waist; she never seemed to pin it up except in the most formal of circumstances.

The atrium filled with sniggers and chuckles. Someone made a joke that Cottia couldn’t quite hear, but its gist was quite clear from how the laughter swelled and how another woman joined her hands together in an obscene gesture.

She raised her head and arched her brows in disbelief at Angharad. The other woman returned a look of scorn. “Don’t act the modest maid when you’ve never done so before. And when you’re so obviously _not_ one.”

“Do me the kindness,” Cottia said flatly, “of waiting till I am not present before you discuss the men of my household the way soldiers discuss whores, eh?”

“‘The men of my household,’ Angharad mimicked. “He’s not your husband, you goose. He’s not kin to you, either. Why do you care if we speak of the fields he ploughs when he’s not at your villa?”

“That’s enough, Angharad.” Constantia said with asperity.

Angharad, still smiling broadly, threw up a hand. “Really? Have I wandered into an enclave of vestal virgins by mistake?”

Constantia looked up from her spindle with flinty eyes and said, in a voice suggesting she were speaking to a simpleton, “The farmstead of Marcus Flavius Aquila is new and rough-hewn yet, and Cottia has hired no girls, so I doubt she has had much opportunity to watch _her husband’s dearest companion_ speak with other women. And I similarly doubt said _dearest companion_ regards her as anything but a sister — if indeed he is so informal with the man who spared his life and manumitted him.”

She paused. “And in our friend Cottia we see a woman as deeply in love with her husband as ever existed, which is rather unsurprising, given who her husband _is_. I will assure you, Angharad, that there are wives whose husbands are able to… take care of them, in all ways, that they need not hire out such duties to all and sundry.”

Angharad’s broad grin froze and her eyes filled with ice-shards. The room about her filled with muffled plosive sounds. As they abated, she tried to recoup her aplomb with a kind, confiding look at Cottia.

“The next time there is a feast, dear, watch your husband’s man. He will sit with a woman and talk with her at length. If you take your eyes off them, the next moment they will be gone. Then, an hour or two later, they will reappear. She will be flushing a bit, straightening her stola here or tucking in a stray wisp of hair there. He will not look much different than he did before, and he will say nothing to anyone. Oh, the women may talk, but if he did not know how to keep his own counsel there’d be nothing for him to talk _about_.”

Cottia blinked at Angharad, then let her eyes fall back to her spinning. Ffion, beside her, changed the subject, but she herself remained silent and let the conversation flow over her again.

 _—”Do you never sleep, Esca?” —”Oh, I do, and quite well at that._ Where _I sleep is another matter.”_ Cottia had assumed the bed of a woman, somewhere on the Downs. The beds of _many_ women had not occurred to her.

It was of no consequence to her, of course. None of her concern.

_Aprilis_  
 _Anno Secundo_  
 _130 CE_

Spring eventually began to push out the winter like green shoots sundering ice as they burst through it. Cottia waited only till the soil was dried sufficiently of snow-melt before she crouched down in the plot of earth Marcus had dug for her. Over the growing shelf of her belly she worked seeds into the softening earth. Row after row, column after column. Cabbage, vetch, turnips, peas, carrot, mustard. Enough for a first greens-garden. She’d have liked celery and radish, too, but for the coming year she could easily enough trade for those.

She was in the garden, pulling weeds, on the morning she felt something give way within her. For the last several weeks she’d felt the child pull and tug in her womb, but this was less gentle, more decisive — and, she thought, early. Far too early. Startled, she rose, and as she gained her feet they were of a sudden doused in a wet warmth.

“Marcus! Esca! _Marcus!_ ”

She heard footsteps running toward her before she saw Esca round the corner of the house. “Cottia! What’s wrong?”

“Get Con—” was all she was able to utter before she felt as though a fist had been driven into her belly. She nearly bent double, then grabbed Esca’s arm. “No!” she gasped. “Don’t pull me to my feet again, I won’t be there for long.” She dropped to her knees, then looked up into his alarmed face and gritted out, “Constantia. Bring her here.”

“Let me bring you inside—”

“ _No!_ Get her _now,_ Esca!”

She didn’t know if it were her face, her tone, or that this was women’s business, but he turned from her straightaway and ran to the barn. Shortly thereafter Cornix darted across their land, Esca’s heels digging into the horse’s rippling black flanks.

Cottia lay on her side atop the newly planted seeds and breathed deeply, trying to throttle the blind panic rising in her with the knowledge that she wasn’t likely to be pushing the child out into the dirt in the time it took Esca to bring Constantia and a few others back with him. _Before long,_ she thought, _I’ll wish I could have_.

She heard a low whine at her ear, and a wet nose at her neck. “Oh, Cub,” she said. The wolf lay down next to her, and she put her arms about him and buried her face in his rank coat. He did not startle or growl when she gasped or grunted in pain. Once or twice he licked her cheek or her hair.

Within the hour she heard hoof-beats. Bellicia rode pillion behind Esca on Cornix; Constantia held to Deieda on the back of the latter’s gray mare Cita. Seated on another of Constantia’s horses, the roan Irenaeus, was Sulia, and behind her were bundles fastened to Irenaeus’s back.

They pulled up alongside the garden. Constantia flung herself off the mare. “Off with you,” she snapped at Cub, who got to his feet with a whine but obediently trotted away. In a trice she had her arm about Cottia’s waist.

“Esca,” she said. “Take the bundles off Irenaeus and bring them into Cottia’s bedroom. And heat some water; we’ll have need of it. Sulia, go unpack what Esca brings in. Bellicia, tie up the horses and then come to the bedroom. Deieda, help me bring Cottia to bed.”

Cottia leant into the frame made of Constantia’s and Deieda’s arms and let them walk her into the house. The fire roared in the hearth under the kettle. Constantia and Deieda walked Cottia past it, into the hall, into her bedroom, where Esca stood unwrapping an oddly shaped object perhaps half his height. Meanwhile Sulia lay out items on the kist: sea-sponges, a large vial of oil and a smaller one of salt, pots of ointments and herbs and infusions, woollen bandages, filled bladders, a knife, something on a leather thong.

Esca slid the last of the wrappings off the strange object. Cottia stared at it, and the reality hit her like another contraction.

“Do you be at ease,” Constantia said, chafing her hand. “If you are brave it will go easier for you.” There was no note of condemnation in her voice. Then she turned to Esca, whose anxious gaze was fixed on Cottia’s chalk-white face, and her tone sharpened. “Out. Bring us the water and then be gone with you. We will take care of her and the child.”

“See that you do,” he said, returning sharp for sharp. Constantia blinked, but said nothing, as he turned on his heel, nearly walking into a startled Bellicia.

Constantia and Deieda eased Cottia down on the bed, Constantia clucking at the softness of the mattress and how unsuited it was for labour. Cottia lay on her side, facing away from the door. She heard it open once more, heard Esca’s foot-falls, heavier than usual, and then felt as well as heard the kettle settling on the floor. In the ensuing cold silence she heard his steps retreat, and then the smart sound of the door shutting tight.

Then there were hands tugging at her _cingulum_. Cottia looked up and saw that Bellicia had replaced Constantia at the side of the bed. One of them, either her or Deieda, unpinned her stola while the other rolled her off it. She raised her arms to let Bellicia work the undertunic up and off her.

She raised her hips as Deieda pushed a pillow beneath it, then gasped and clutched her hands to her belly as another spasm hit her.

“Shhh.” Deieda began to lay the bladders against her sides; they were full of warm oil. Then she draped a warm, oil-soaked length of linen over Cottia’s belly. The day was a mild one, and the room had already begun to grow warmer with the steam from the kettle. Cottia felt sweat erupt at her brow and course down her temples and cheeks.

As Deieda rubbed Cottia’s belly through the damp cloth, Constantia sat on the bed between Cottia’s parted thighs, her right hand glistening with oil. Her hand disappeared; Cottia grunted as it stretched her and she felt the forefinger circling the opening of her womb.

Bellicia approached her, the thong in her hands. “Lift your head, love,” she said. Cottia obeyed, and Bellicia leant forward to slip the thong over her head. Cottia felt something cool and hard rest against her left breast. As much as she trusted Constantia, she wished she had thought to choose her own amulet. Would the Roman goddess who protected women in childbirth heed the prayer on the tiny metal scroll for a British woman, even one married to a Roman? And then another invisible fist was driving into her belly, and such questions were more than she could ponder.

Time passed. A great deal of it, judging from how the light shifted outside the window. The room grew warmer and Cottia sweatier. Rays of pain, more of them and closer together, shot through her belly. Her hips felt like the handles of an amphora being vigorously pulled in opposite directions, and some vengeful god had placed a wedge against the small of her back and was driving a hammer into it for all he was worth. Her mouth was dry, her lips cracked, but Constantia shook her head at Cottia’s pleas for water, even a sip. She was grateful for whoever it was who held her hand and clutched it back tightly whenever she squeezed.

The sky through the window was just beginning to darken when Constantia said, “She is ready.”

Cottia felt Deieda’s arms behind her shoulders. She let the bigger woman sit her up on the bed, and she swung trembling legs over the edge. Leaning on Deieda’s great frame, with Bellicia holding her free arm, she let them lead her to the birthing-stool. As they sat her down, another cramp drilled through her belly, and she fell forward, gripping the cross-bar so hard as the breath wheezed out of her she was surprised it didn’t break in her hands. The other women eased her backwards again.

“Breathe, Cottia,” Constantia said. “Steadily. In… out. In… out. And push down.”

The fabric of the world seemed to tear, revealing a red haze beneath it. The haze obscured her vision and swallowed up time, but she was still sensible of Deieda’s hands on her shoulders, Sulia’s gentle downward pushes on her belly, the soft pad of linen that Bellicia, kneeling behind the stool, pressed firmly between Cottia’s buttocks. The smooth cool pressure of the stool’s heavy back against her straining hips. Her fingers cramping on the cross-bar. Her own tears, hot on her face, and the heaving of her own lungs.

A vile word spoken by Constantia, a word Cottia had never heard her use before. Sulia asking a question, Constantia responding harshly, “I’ll have to turn him.” The edge of fear as well as anger in the reply. Constantia’s whole hand inside Cottia again. A furnace in her belly. A massive ball of stone threatening to rend her womb from the inside out. Warm wetness coating her inner thighs and pooling around her buttocks, some of it thin, some of it slimy, all of it smelling foul.

The room kept disappearing before her in a darkening mist, then reappearing as Deieda passed a sprig of pennyroyal beneath Cottia’s nose. Spear-points dug into her innards each time it reappeared. The third or fourth time Constantia shouted, “All the gods damn you — _stay_ with me!”

Cottia stayed. She pushed. She swayed in Deieda’s grasp. She pushed. She choked down bile. She pushed. She howled. She pushed.

Of a sudden, the ball of stone was gone.

There was a thin wail.

“Cottia,” Constantia said. “You have a son, a healthy one.”

“A son.” The words didn’t seem to mean anything. The only thing she understood was that it was over. But the words of gratitude came to her lips anyway. She got out only “Thank the La—” before she fell headlong into blackness.

 

The blackness seemed to go on forever, like a long, long passage. Inside it was pain, worse than that of the red haze, as well as burning heat and intolerable cold. One moment she was on her funeral pyre and the flames had dried all the sweat out of her. The next she was plunged into a lake that floated with ice, and she was not shivering as much as racked with bone-breaking convulsions.

Inside the blackness was also a roaring sound, enveloping her, as if it were the wall of the passage. Sometimes it seemed to thin, and voices passed through it. Constantia snapping orders to the other women. Sobbing that sounded like Bellicia. Once she heard Marcus’s deep voice, which he raised louder and louder, in counterpoint to Constantia’s, which never grew louder but grew icier and icier until it began to crack.

Then she heard her mother’s laughter, and the piping voices of her brothers and sisters. A man was tossing her in the air and catching her, over and over. It was strange, she thought, that her mother’s new husband, who was not so new anymore, would do this to his grown step-daughter. But then she looked down into the beaming face of her father, and it was big, so much bigger than her own head.

Then the black passage ended. She was consumed by neither heat nor cold, she was not in pain, and all was quiet.

She opened her eyes. Her head was bowed, and, beneath a snow-white tunic, she saw her own knees beneath her. All about her were hares: darting, hopping, sitting, lying flat. Not a one of them seemed frightened of her. Impulsively she put a hand out to the nearest, and the bright-eyed brown creature nuzzled its face into her palm. She stroked its head, wondering what strange place was this.

Something, a noise that was not a noise, made her lift her head.

“Oh. Oh, my _Lady_ ,” she said.

Above her sat a woman in her prime astride a black horse. Her mantle, dark-green and richly embroidered, flowed over her armour-clad form and past her feet. Her bow and arrow were slung over her back, and a long spear was in her right hand. Cottia could make out the shape of a thigh-scabbard beneath the mantle. Gold and jewels glinted from the bands that held the Lady’s hair, as fiery as Cottia’s but straight as her arrows, and from her throat and ears and fingers. Her eyes were a clear sky-blue.

“Why are you here, girl?” the Lady asked. “I have not called you to Me yet. I will not call for you a long time to come.” There was no anger or perplexity in the words.

“I… I have just borne a son,” Cottia said. She knew she was not answering the Lady’s question, but it was the thing to say, somehow.

“Indeed.” The Lady’s voice was, at once, fierce, amused, and compassionate. “A fine son, befitting to the flowers of Rome and Britain who fashioned him. In the day of Boudicca, who would have thought a man of Rome would cleave to this land and honour it, would take to wife the daughter of a long line of warriors, and make a boon companion of the last living son to a great chieftain?”

She fell silent. The jewels above and on either side of Her eyes winked in a light that seemed to come from no direction in particular. It infused her and the fur of the hares and whatever it was that lay all about them.

“You shall go back to his house and lie in his bed, Cottia, with the new babe at your breast. Nor are you done bearing children. You shall suffer great griefs, griefs I cannot spare you, but you shall also taste great joys. And all shall know you, and one day remember you, as greater even than the Roman woman you served — mother, trader, teacher, leader.”

Cottia dropped her head again. “My Lady,” she whispered.

She heard the rasp and jingle of metal, and then a soft thud. She looked up halfway, and she saw armour-shod feet, hares lazing about them in an entirely un-hare-like way. When she looked up all the way, the Lady was crouching before her, and she felt a kiss on her brow.

And then she was in darkness again, but not the blackness of the passage, just the night with its scattering of late stars.

She was drenched. The bed-clothes about her were drenched. The odours of sweat and shit and piss and putrefaction hit her like the stench of a beast in the forest. And she hurt, dear gods, she _hurt_ , from cunt upward to some point inside her rib-cage.

Bellicia dozed in a chair next to the bed. “Bellicia,” Cottia said hoarsely. The shut eyes in the round face did not even flutter. “Bellicia,” she repeated, trying to raise her voice but unable to do so. She gathered her strength, leant over, and laid a weak hand on Bellicia’s knee.

Bellicia’s eyes came open. They settled on Cottia, and they filled with tears.

“Please, Bellicia,” Cottia said. “I would have water.”

 

They wanted to bring Marcus to her immediately. She would not have it.

“No. By all the gods, _no_. Please, do you bring me to the bath-house and cleanse me before he sees me. And strip the bed, and fling the shutters open, and burn candles, and scent the chamber with whatever you can find. Do what you can for the mattress, we can’t afford a new one, but if the reek can’t be washed from the bed-clothes just burn them. Where is my son?”

“I had him taken to my villa to be fed,” Constantia said. “There is a girl there whose babe died last week. I will have him fetched back.”

Cottia was silent for a moment.

“You did not think I would live,” she finally said.

“No,” Constantia said. “I did not.” Her voice and her features were as schooled as ever, but there was a grey tone to her complection, and her eyes were deeply hollowed.

Deieda and Bellicia walked Cottia to the bath-house, holding a bed-rug about her to shield her from the eyes of any men who might be about, but none were. Constantia had forbidden her to soak while her womb remained open, so they lay her carefully on the cool tiles of the floor and passed warm wet cloths all over her. They told her she had been in a fever for three days, thrashing, raving, calling for people long lost to her.

Deieda produced a ball of _sapo_ , and she and Bellicia wet and lathered a second round of cloths. Cottia tried to smile wanly at them and touch their hands in reassurance as they ministered to her with the soapy linen, but it seemed to put them at ill-ease. Perhaps the Lady’s kiss had left a cloud of otherworldliness about her. She had no idea, and trying to ponder it was tiring. Eventually she gave up and slipped back into quietude and let them cleanse the lather from her with yet more cloths, then dry her off and slip a clean undertunic onto her.

By the time they walked her back into the main house in the first rays of the sun, the bed-chamber smelt mostly of vinegar, and clean bed-clothes lay on the bed. Sulia was putting away various implements of birthing. And in Constantia’s arms was—

“Marcus Flavius Aquila, the younger,” Cottia said quietly.

For the first time in days, Constantia smiled. “Would you like to hold your son, Cottia?”

“I… I suppose I should be in the bed, lest I drop him,” she said.

Deieda drew the bed-clothes over her knees and lap, and Bellicia unclasped her fibula. Cottia’s undertunic slackened about her shoulders, and she drew down the front of it, and she let Constantia settle Flavius into her arms. The little mouth fastened about her right nipple, and the ache in that breast — an ache she had not even realised, when so much else was sore — began to ease.

“ _Salve, Flavi_ ,” she whispered, brushing a lock of dark, dark hair off his forehead. Sometimes, she knew, babes were born with headfuls of black hair that fell out and were soon replaced by brown or red or yellow locks, but she knew from the stamp of his features that his hair would be ever dark until, perhaps, age began to touch it with grey.

_“Cottia!”_

The sheer rawness of Marcus’s voice, as much as his voice itself, made her lift her head. He stood in the doorway, none of the other women seeking now to bar him. His eyes were wide, bright, and glassy.

She smiled at him, her smile a little less wan than it had been in the bath-house.

“Come meet your son, Marcus.”

For a long time, there were just they three, Marcus with Cottia in the circle of his arms and Flavius close against her breast, sometimes Marcus cradling Flavius when the child had drunk his fill and smiling as if he would never frown again. The other women must have slipped from the chamber as soon as he had entered, but she did not know, precisely.

At one moment, over his shoulder she briefly saw a figure in the doorway, hair set afire by morning light and a glistening track down one cheek. But just at that moment Marcus was bending forward to kiss her. When he had pulled back and her eyes were again open, the figure had disappeared.

 

Constantia stayed with them for another several days, sleeping on a pallet on the bed-chamber floor, never leaving Cottia and Flavius except to wash or use the latrine. And the one time she spoke to Marcus, alone.

“She told me that we should not make love again right away,” Marcus said a few nights after she had left, muffledly, his face buried in Cottia’s hair. “Not for several weeks.”

“Even when a birth is easy, this may be so,” Cottia said, stroking Marcus’s forearm with her fingers. It sorrowed her. And it sorrowed her that she had no desire now, either. She still hurt inside, her sleep was perpetually rent by Flavius’s cries, and she could not unwrap her mind from her encounter with the Lady. She tried to comfort herself with the words _Nor are you done bearing children_. And surely the One who had given them the precious gift of pleasing one another would not take it back from them, at least not for good?

“It is well,” Marcus whispered. “I would not put you in danger again, nor risk taking his mother from my son.”

By then she had begun to be about on her feet again, a bit shakily at first, putting to rights what had gone neglected in the week past. The other women had kept her house as tidy as they could, all but Constantia taking turns cooking for them all plus the men. But the villa’s stores were depleted, the garden untended, and Cottia found herself restless.

Constantia had warned her to not lift jugs of mead or anything heavier for a while, even as she began to feel more herself. For a week or two, Deieda took linens and clothes down to the stream to wash them for Cottia; over the bigger woman’s objections, Cottia insisted she take a few jugs of beer and mead for recompense. But slinging little Flavius over her breast did not seem to tax Cottia’s mending body. Back she slid, snug as a dovetail, into routine: spinning, sewing, weeding, cooking, brewing, making cheese, and going to market.

And tending the animals, which had fallen again to Esca. Cottia did not argue with him when he refused to turn the care of the horses back over to her straightaway, but she insisted upon looking to the rest. She had missed their company.

“They seem pleased to see you as well,” Esca said from Cornix’s stall. He did too, she thought. He did not embrace her, of course, as Marcus had, but when he looked at her it was with a relieved pleasure that had a nearly physical weight to it.

“ _Sa_ , I’m the one who brings them their feed now,” she said pragmatically, the ewe’s left rear hoof in her left hand and a small sharp knife in her right. But she’d had the same impression as Esca. Even the belligerent lackwit of a cock seemed to eye her more calmly and remain unusually nearby her.

“Your other few hundred creatures must be equally happy to see you. Though maybe not in a few weeks, when you’re robbing them of the fruits of their labour.”

Cottia smiled. “That will be a challenge. I rather look forward to it. Are you sure you don’t care to help me with it, Esca?” she asked with patently false earnestness, knowing what the answer would be.

He shuddered. “I think I would rather take up arms against the Romans again. Only five or six of them can swarm me at once, not hundreds of them. At least they’d leave me alive. Probably.”

_Iunius_  
 _Anno Secundo_  
 _130 CE_

She had heard Chrestus quote Columella so often on the care of bees she could quote the Iberian farmer in her sleep. One harvested honey on a morning at the very end of spring, after the worker-bees had driven the drones from the skep. A few weeks before Midsummer, she begged Constantia for the loan of the girl who had briefly suckled Flavius, if that girl still had milk. The girl did, and she rode out to Cottia a few days before the solstice, pleased to see that the child she had nursed and his mother both thrived.

Cottia settled Flavius in with the nurse-maid, then made her way down to the clover-hollow, clad in a long, loose hooded cloak of coarse undyed linen. A flint-pouch hung from its _cingulum_ , as did a small pouch of galbanum. In the large basket she carried with her were a long iron knife, a scraping implement of the same length, an earthenware pot with a narrow spout, and a sack of coals.

When she reached the skeps, the coolness of the day had already begun to burn off. She was tempted to make short work of the task, but she forced herself to move slowly and carefully, not wishing to frighten her charges. Once she had tipped the coals into the pot and fired them, she mixed in the fragrant galbanum, covering her nose and mouth against the fumes, and set the spout into the back of the first skep. With one forceful breath huffed onto the coals, out came the bees in an angry thrumming cloud.

Quickly she smoked out the bees of the second skep, then of the third. Wreathed in pungent smoke and sweating under the cloak, she worked quickly with the knife and the scraper. The soundest combs full of honey and those with young in them, she let be, but the rest she piled into the basket. She turned each skep round so that back became front, which would ease removal of the older combs the next time, and she lidded the pot to extinguish the coals. She would retrieve it when it had cooled, but for now she simply threw the other tools atop the comb-pile and hoisted the considerably weightier basket onto her head. Constantia might have scolded her for it, but two months after child-bed her innards seemed to have mended.

Shortly after she hung her cloak on a peg in the dim of a tiny shed behind the farm-house. Then she set comb after comb into a woven cone of withies that hung from the ceiling, its point hovering above a large earthenware tub. As the honey flowed, she held six jugs up to the stream one by one until they had filled.

Just outside the shed was an oaken cask, already half-full of rain-water. To this cask, she brought one jug at a time and emptied it into the water, then stirred the mixture with a long staff. When the contents of all six jugs had been mixed in, she bound a wide piece of linen over the mouth of the cask.

In forty days, the cask would contain mead. Over the next two, she would skim insects and pollen from the honey in the tub, and she would boil the empty combs for wax. For now, she cleansed her sticky hands as best she could on a piece of linen and headed for the house.

Marcus stood in the atrium, an odd look on his face. She frowned in confusion.

“I thought you and Esca were off to Calleva today on business.”

“Esca is. I thought I would… take care of matters here. Such as the ploughing of a field long neglected.” He came to her, then, and she understood what she saw in his eyes.

When his arms wound about her waist, she raised her own, then hesitated. “Ah, my hands are sticky from harvesting the honey. I should rinse them first.”

“I will save you the trouble,” he said, his eyes hot now.

He grasped her left wrist and raised her hand to his mouth, which sucked in her forefinger deeply. She watched, hypnotised, as his lips worked against it. Then he took in each of her other fingers and her thumb, one by one.

“ _Esculenta_ ,” he murmured, taking up her right hand now and sucking its fingers, then licking his way down her palm. “ _Dulcis_.”

Her damp hands found his shoulders now, and her lips, his. He tasted of honey.

_Augustus_  
 _Anno Secundo_  
 _130 CE_

By harvest-time, she knew she was with child again. This time she did not need to declare it; Marcus recognised how her body began to ripen again, and when she reached for the chamber-pot in the morning he smiled indulgently as much as he offered comfort.

She did not know if Esca had also noted the changes in her, or if Marcus had simply told him, but one day as she tended to the ewe she looked up in surprise when a shadow fell over them both.

“ _Domina_ … I have something for you.”

The something was small and tightly wrapped in linen. Cottia unfolded the cloth and shook out, into the palm of her left hand, a small thing made of bone with a hole bored into it.

“An amulet?”

_“Sa.”_

A curved shape, rather like a teardrop flattened on one side. As she turned it in the dim light of the barn she saw the pointed nose, the legs folded beneath, and the long ear pinned against the upper edge of each side.

“A hare,” she said softly. The back of her neck began to prickle, and there was a hum in her ears. She felt the ghost of brown fur brushing her palm, although all that lay in it was hard smooth stone.

Esca grinned. “I suppose I could have found it at any market anywhere in Britain — or the world, perhaps; the hare means the same thing to the Romans. But it’s from Camulodunum. There is a woman there who used to live in Calleva. I asked Constantia to help me write to her and to send her coin; I thought perhaps something from Iceni lands might be … helpful to you, the next time.”

He paused. “Fare you well, Cottia? You look very far away.”

“I — I am sorry, Esca. It is a thoughtful gift, and I thank you for it.” She breathed in deeply. “But the hare signifies more than fertility. It is sacred to the Lady Andred of the Iceni. The Warrior and the Mother. Whom I… I saw. When I lay ill.”

He paled.

“She sent you back to us,” he said.

“She did,” Cottia said.

“Then I have done well. Or my… friend in Calleva did.”

Cottia did not ask him what sort of friend. “Did you tell her how I fared the last time?”

“ _Na_ , I did not. Though perhaps she gathered as much. She said in her reply she was surprised; men tend not to know of these things, let alone consider them.”

She had dropped her eyes to the stone hare again when a great grey blur flashed by at the edge of her vision. When she looked up, Aeolus was several paces away, hunched over a mouse.

“ _Probe, Aeole!_ ” she exclaimed. She watched the cat swat the poor wee creature from paw to paw, making as if to let it escape, then striking again, picking it up in his teeth and shaking it from side to side. When the mouse was finally dead he devoured its body with great gusto, then deposited the head at Cottia’s feet like a courtier presenting the Empress with the most precious of jewels.

She approvingly scratched his head, provoking a loud rumble of deep self-satisfaction, then laughingly pushed him away as he tried to rub his body against her. “Go on with you, I don’t need your fleas.”

She looked up in time to catch Esca turning away with a shudder.

“Ever the Centurion’s Hound — no affinity for cats,” she teased.

“A hound kills _cleanly!_ ” he said, with feeling. “Or, at least, quickly. It doesn’t torment its prey like that.”

She shrugged. “That’s how the gods made them; would you hold it against them, especially when they do us a service?”

“Of course not. I just wish it didn’t remind me of—” He stopped and caught his breath. “Of folk I’ve known.”

_Usque ab Hieme, Anno Secundo, ad Ver, Anno Tertio_  
 _130-131 CE_

Before the snows fell, Marcus, Esca, and their hired lads had completed a second wing of the house. More children would sleep there someday, but for now, one of the three chambers lay empty, other than when Cub lay on its floor. In the second Marcus kept a writing-desk, his books, his maps, everything from his days with the Army, his few mementos of his family and of Etruria. The third, they made into a tablinum.

Cottia had learned from Constantia how to keep accounts, a task that fell to the lady of a villa. She found she’d a knack for it: Numbers made sense to her, and adding them up produced a pleasant sort of gratification that was both similar to and different from those she found in keeping house or tending her animals, or nursing and playing with Flavius. It contributed to a second peaceful winter, albeit one toward whose end she kept pushing her chair further and further away from the desk as her belly grew between them.

In early spring she straddled the birthing-stool again. This time the pain was less and her labours shorter: The babe was fully formed, head facing downward as was natural. And, this time, the babe was a girl.

“‘Cartimandua’?” Marcus said, frowning.

 _“Sa,”_ Cottia said. Her new daughter, cleansed and wrapped in linen, took ravenous suck at her right breast.

“By all rights she should be called ‘Flavia.’”

“We have had this discussion, Marcus,” Cottia said in a voice underlaid with iron. “Our sons will bear Roman names. Our daughters will bear British ones.”

“Cottia—”

“No. And I’ll not have the same damned name used over and over for each girl. ‘Flavia the First, Flavia the Second, Flavia the Third’ — even Roman mares get their own names, even cows and sows and bitch-hounds, for the Lady’s sake! Cartimandua was the name of a queen who treated honourably with Rome; what better name could you desire?”

“It is an outlandish name,” Marcus snapped, then closed his mouth when Cottia’s eyes burned into him.

“Like ‘Cottia,’ perhaps?” she said coldly. “Well and good, I shall speak to Lucanus in a few weeks about having it legally changed to ‘Camilla.’ My aunt will be pleased.”

“Oh, by all the gods—” He seemed to be fumbling for an argument. “Cartimandua wasn’t even of your people, Cottia! She was Brigantes, not Iceni!”

Cottia bared her teeth at him. “You’re right, Marcus. Perhaps I should instead name her ‘Boudicca’?”

His face darkened, and he strode out of the bed-chamber. Constantia’s straight back was to Cottia, who could therefore not see her expression, and Sulia’s was as impassive as ever, but Deieda was openly smirking, and Bellicia was trying without much success to suppress a smile.

Male voices, distant ones, echoed in from the atrium. One was deep and, even at this distance, patently irritated; the other lighter and calmer. But before long the second one exploded in unrestrained laughter, which continued after Cottia heard the sound of angry foot-falls and the slamming of a door.

_Aestatis Solstitio_  
 _Anno Tertio_  
 _131 CE_

In the end, Cottia thought much later, they had argued for nothing.

Midsummer came upon them hot and dry. Cartimandua’s forehead was hot and dry, too, and she would not take suck or look about her or grasp her own toes as she usually did. She languished in her cradle, flushed and silent.

Constantia sent Bellicia, who had seen her own children through fevers when they were very small. Cottia held her daughter while Bellicia trickled willow-bark infusion, sweetened with honey, into the babe’s mouth. “Oh, no, Carti,” Cottia lamented as the infant’s face contorted and she spat it out, following this with an angry wail.

“Well, now she cries, whereas before she was silent, so perhaps this is a good sign,” Bellicia said.

But Cartimandua did not cease to wail when Cottia held her close and stroked her little bare head. The wails became screams, and the tiny face grew as red as a beet. The babe’s little hands clutched at her ears and temples, and her face knotted tighter, and she screamed all the louder.

Bellicia had disappeared briefly; now she came back with a small tub in both hands, full of cool well water. Cottia hastily stripped the infant and plunged her into the tub, holding her head erect above the water. Cartimandua thrashed her limbs, splashing both her elders, and continued to scream. Bellicia began to sing, softly and soothingly, but the child’s screams drowned out the lullaby.

Not an hour later, Cartimandua no longer thrashed nor screamed. Bellicia, lips trembling, ducked her head and held her mouth above the child’s for the space of a breath. A last breath. And then Cartimandua breathed no more.

Cottia ceased to breathe, too, at least for a moment. Surely, Bellicia had misjudged, and the fever was broken. Carti was just sleeping. She would smile at her mother and laugh and hold out her little arms to be lifted close. She _would_.

And then Bellicia, a tear running down one cheek, was closing the child’s eyes with a gentle fingertip.

Cottia stood and stared. She thought, _No_ , but her mouth was full of lead. Her body was made of lead.

“I will tell Marcus,” Bellicia said huskily, her hand on Cottia’s shoulder. Cottia stared straight ahead of herself.

When Marcus came to her and flung his arms around her and buried wet eyes into her shoulder, she obediently put her arms around him in turn. But her head remained upright, and her eyes remained dry and unseeing.

_Iulius_  
 _Anno Tertio_  
 _131 CE_

She had heard stories of the Roman _lemures_ , the shades of the dead who could find no rest in the afterworld and who wandered despondently among the living. Some said it was because they had been wicked in life. Others said it was because they had died young or violently.

She had become like a shade, she thought.

She cooked meals. She brewed drink. She did the accounts. She set cheese with the milk she took from the cow. She fetched honey from the skeps, eggs from the hens. She tended Flavius, she tended the animals, she tended the garden. She spun and sewed and mended. She bathed, she plaited her hair. But she did not laugh, she did not smile, she did not converse, she neither paid visits to friends nor hosted them. She did nothing that brought pleasure, because pleasure no longer existed for her.

That included the petting of Cub, the stroking of his fur. But this did not keep him from seeking her out and laying his great rough head on her knee, something he had never done before. If both her hands were not occupied she would rest a free one on it, and they would sit together, woman and wolf, for a time. She thought under the heavy dulling grief that, perhaps, he knew. But she hadn’t the energy to ponder it.

The only true respite she had was in dreams, and that not dependable. Sometimes she dreamed that she held her warm, living, burbling daughter again; then she would wake and remember, and her heart shattered anew like slate under a hammer. Sometimes she knew while dreaming that Cartimandua was dead, and dreaming brought her no relief at all.

Nothing she lifted to her lips tasted but of ashes. She could feel her belly cramp with hunger, but she had no drive to sate it, no more than if her shoulder or foot had pained her instead. But work had to be done, and work was a refuge, and she needed strength to work, so she made herself eat until her hunger eased, and then she rose from table with a whispered excuse and took her plate with her, ignoring the eyes that followed her from the room.

Her stolae began to loosen about her. At first, she thought it was merely that, with no child to suckle, her breasts were dwindling. Then the stolae began to hang on her as if on a withe. She had no energy for taking them in; she did not even care. She simply pinned up the hem and tightened her _succingulum_.

One evening as summer drew to a close, she listlessly pushed tid-bits about her plate. Esca and Marcus were speaking, she knew not of what; none of the words penetrated, and she had grown accustomed to the subtle strain in their voices over the last few months. She started in surprise to feel small arms clinging to her leg through her stola.

“ _Flavi_ ,” she said, in a dull-witted tone of surprise. “You walk now.”

The room went silent. She realised what she had said, what she had revealed.

She leant over and folded her arms around the boy. She tried, and failed, to stop tears from welling up and spilling out, so she buried her head in his dark hair, so like Marcus’s, instead.

She tensed, waited for either Marcus or Esca to say something. The silence remained and hung heavily.

She planted a kiss on the crown of Flavius’s head, then straightened. She thought of saying, _I will be in the tablinum_ , but her throat was tight, and they could find her easily enough, and … it didn’t matter where she was, at all.

Leaving her plate on the table, she rose and turned. An angry exhalation from behind her hurried her out of the room like wind against a sail.

Work had been a refuge, but the doors of that refuge were shut to her now. Six, seven, more times she began to add figures on the wax tablet, and each time they ceased to mean anything before her eyes. She would scrape the tablet down and start again, and before long she might as well have been trying to make numerical sense out of the patterns in tree bark.

The eleventh time, she gave a shout of anger and cast the stylus across the room. It struck the wall with a thud and fell, leaving a dent and raising a cloud of plaster-dust.

She felt stupid. She felt childish. She buried her face in her hands, where it remained until a gentle touch on her shoulder made her start like a frightened doe.

Marcus sat on the edge of the desk, looking down at her. There was pain in his eyes, but also the look of the commander. She could feel her back begin to stiffen even before he spoke.

“Cottia. _Dulcis_ , this cannot go on.”

She stared, as if the words were as meaningless as the figures had become. He took both her hands in his.

“You are destroying yourself with grief. And you are destroying the rest of us. I cannot speak for Esca, but… Cottia, I cannot watch you drift around like a shade of the dead, and wasting away until you’re little more solid than one. It tears at my heart.”

She felt blood begin to rush in her veins, building to a pounding behind her eyes and in her temples, like a river over a precipice. But it was only as she began to reply that she realised how very, very angry she was. She spoke slowly at first, but the words began to come from her in a torrent.

“Marcus Flavius Aquila. That was _your_ daughter, too, whose pyre we lit. Why are _you_ not walking beside me in darkness? How can you smile, how can you laugh, how can you think to reach for me at night?”

He looked as stunned as though she’d asked why he didn’t pull the moon out of the sky for her.

“I _did_ grieve for her!”

“Oh, ‘ _did_ ,’ is it?” she snarled.

“Yes, ‘ _did_.’” The exasperation in his voice made her fists ball in her lap. “I miss her and think fondly of her, but she is two months gone, and I am not indulging myself in black moods that won’t bring her back!”

She found herself shaking. She stood up from the chair; with him on the desk, they were eye to eye.

“ _You_ ,” she said. “You… _presume_ , Marcus, to tell me how _I_ may grieve the child _I_ carried, _I_ delivered, _I_ tried to save from fever while _you_ slept. I don’t care that you are _paterfamilias_ , I don’t care how many damned men you commanded at Isca Dumnoniorum, you overstep yourself _._ ”

His fingers dug into her forearm. “I want my wife back, Cottia. And, as you _might_ have noticed, my son wants his mother back.”

She shook his grip off hard. “ _Your_ son,” she repeated. She could feel her lips curl back. “That’s the crux of it, isn’t it? If it were _your_ son instead of _my_ daughter, the precious heir to a proud Roman legacy instead of a girl with a barbarian name and a dowry to build someday? You’d not be so sanguine. But Cartimandua wasn’t that important, was she?”

The shock that flashed briefly across his face turned at once to fury. He drew his hand back, he who had never struck her before. Cottia raised her chin and stared at him, hard and remorseless.

He dropped his hand, but the look he gave her made her wish he had slapped her instead.

She choked back a cry and bolted from the tablinum, then from the house. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a head come up, a face watch her in alarm. She didn’t turn. She continued to run, and she did not stop running until she was past the bee-skeps and at the edge of the stream running at the southern border of their lands.

As the reeds high on the bank began to thicken around her feet, she dropped to a crouch, then fell to her knees. Her gasps of exertion did not subside but turned to great, wrenching sobs, and then to the loud, fathomless, wracking cries that are the sound of a human heart as it comes undone.

She was not sure how long she had been there before she heard foot-falls. They stopped a pace or so behind her, and she heard her name whispered with pain.

It was not Marcus’s voice.

She turned over her shoulder and looked up at Esca. Grey eyes soft, face as open as a child’s, he trod the last few steps to stand next to where she knelt. He dropped to his own knees, and his arms went about her.

She leant into him, and then the grief was upon her again, riding her like a Wild Hunter his steed. She shook as she keened, the jagged broken sounds rising from deep in her lungs like malign spirits dredged up from a dark well of despair. He did not sway with her; he held her steady, one strong hand splayed high on her back, the other stroking her hair.

Cottia quieted into sobs, then shaking breaths, then still ones.

Esca dropped his hands from her to produce a woollen cloth from inside the sleeve of his tunic. She took it, wincing with embarrassment at how she had dampened his shoulder, and she blew her nose with a loud, undignified noise.

“I look a fright, I’m sure,” she said, her voice thick and wretched.

He said nothing as he sat back on his heels. His eyes were on the stream, where a bittern, having decided that the featherless and furless creatures on the bank were no threat, had come to life from among the reeds at the very edge. It stepped stiffly about the shallows, ducked, and came up again, its throat working against the frog whose hind legs protruded from its bill.

Eventually he said, “Marcus Flavius Aquila is the finest man I have ever met in my life. Ever. I owe him my life” — and here he looked straight at Cottia, to make sure she took his full meaning — “that I live at all, and that I have anything to live for. If he were to ask me to make the journey into the North again with him, with all the misdirections and dangers of three years gone” — and he laughed, low and scornfully, and turned his eyes back to the water.

“Truth be told, I’d ask him if he’d gone daft, having now as he did not then a fruitful villa, a fine young son, and a beautiful and clever wife who adores him. I am still the Centurion’s Hound, and I would be honour-bound to lie at the feet of his lady and his child now… but, Cottia, my heart would go with him, and if he never came back, neither would my heart.”

He stopped. Cottia, who knew him now and knew he was not done, waited. He continued to watch as the bittern dove once more and came up once more, its gullet pumping.

“He is the man that he is because he is the sort of man who can… walk out of the shadows of this world untouched.” He looked at her again. “I am not. I have been his companion, his eyes and ears, his right hand. But, as much as I myself have survived, I could not have been through all that he was through — the death of his father, the family dishonour, the shattered leg, the loss of position, the second surgery, and _then_ all we survived in the North — and shown even half his aplomb, half his good nature.

“He does not understand this, Cottia. He will not ever understand it. It is not in him to. That is the other side of what makes him so remarkable.”

He paused. “Do you know, when we returned from the North to Calleva, I was brooding over the two years just behind me, two years of being owned by other men. He told me to let it pass, that I could not dwell on it, just as he could not dwell on being lamed.”

Something in his eyes hardened; she knew it had nothing to do with her but she shivered.

“I do not know how it is for a woman. Perhaps it is the same, perhaps not. But I tell you this, Cottia: If you were born a free man, and you are then made the possession of another, it never leaves you. Ever. Not even were your masters the kindest who ever walked the earth… and Marcus was not my only master.”

Her head rose. Never, ever in her memory had he spoken so bitterly. It made her remember him as she had first seen him, so long ago, in the amphitheatre, at the mercy of the retinarius and of the bloodthirsty crowd. Made her think with shame of how the foolish chit she had once been spoke contemptuously of slaves where he could hear.

And then it made her take his hand. He started slightly at first, then let her wrap her long slim fingers — rough-skinned, ragged-nailed, no longer a proper lady’s, her aunt had sniffed these two years past on the few occasions Cottia had seen her — about his broader ones.

His eyes rested upon their joined hands for a while. The evening was settling in about their shoulders. Another bittern joined the first to dive and dine companionably alongside it. Moths began to flit in the air as it lost the golden cast of sunlight and deepened into blue.

“Esca,” she said softly. “I have said… words I should not have.”

He lifted his head to look at her again. The banked rage was gone from his eyes. He spoke with certainty.

“Had Cartimandua been a boy, or had Flavius died instead” — he made an involuntary warding gesture against the second thought with his free hand — “Marcus would have said the same to you as he did tonight. He grieved for her just as he would have grieved for a son, and he will remember her tenderly. But it is done for him, the grief.”

She had not just now been thinking of Marcus. His face, white with the pain she had just struck into him, appeared before her. She closed her eyes briefly against the image of his arm, rising to strike her back.

When she opened them again, Esca was still regarding her. Quiet, compassionate, waitful.

“Flavius,” she said, with a note of guilt.

He smiled. “I think there is a curly-headed eaglet who might like for his mother to put him to bed.”

He stood, still holding her hand, raising her along with him, and turned back toward the villa.

“Esca—” It was awkward, now that the moment had passed, but she would have it out. “I not only said words I should not have today, to Marcus. I said them before you, cruel and careless words about slaves, when I lived next door to Marcus and his Uncle Aquila. I would take them back, if I could.”

He turned to her again. The hint of surprise in his features sank without trace into a mild, almost serene expression, with a not-quite smile.

“Did you, _domina_? Truth be told, I do not remember.”

For the rest of her days she would never be able to decide whether he had forgiven her or whether he had truly forgotten.

 

When they returned, she heard voices coming from Marcus’s office. Betimes Esca joined him in there, but never Cottia. Marcus had never forbidden her entry, but it was a man’s chamber, and she left him to his peace when he retreated there.

She and Esca stood in the doorway. Marcus sat at his writing-desk with Flavius in his lap. A map of the Empire lay on the desk, and Marcus had been patiently, sweetly pointing out this nation and that to the boy, who sometimes looked away, sometimes looked at the map, and sometimes followed his father’s long straight finger with a chubby one. Cub lay at Marcus’s feet, relaxed, tongue lolling.

When Marcus looked up and saw Cottia, he paled, the muscles in his face tightening. She kept her face impassive, but she felt pain to see him in pain and to know she was the cause of it, and to be unable to right it immediately.

“Marcus, we thought perhaps to put Flavius to bed. Let me take the boy,” Esca said quietly. She turned her head sharply, but her protest died unspoken: His eyes were not unlike they had been earlier, at the river.

Marcus hesitated a moment, then rose, holding Flavius under his arms; he walked to the doorway and handed the child over to Esca. Flavius made a happy crowing sound, and Esca grinned and swung him up on his shoulders. Cub rose and padded over to them, brushing companionably against Cottia and licking her hand on his way out.

Cottia watched the three of them walk from the chamber, then Marcus return to his chair. The knot under her ribs shifted and loosened slightly, but it yet ached. Not all had been set right.

“Marcus.”

“Cottia.” His eyes and his voice were flat.

She walked over to him, stood beside him for a moment contemplating the top of his head, and then fell to her knees beside him and lay her cheek against his thigh.

He froze. She could feel his erratic pulse through his braccae.

“Husband, I am so sorry,” she said. “I wish I could take back what I said to you this afternoon. I spoke in pain. I beg your forgiveness.”

He didn’t move for a moment, two moments. Then she felt his hand atop her head, stroking her hair, and felt as much as heard him sigh.

“I know,” he said softly.

They were silent for a short while, and then he continued: “I … may have not known of what I spoke, myself. I do forget that to carry a babe for most of a year would of necessity make the grief of losing her sharper. And you do not have women in the house to help you.” The last had a husk of guilt about it.

She did not reply. She supposed he could feel the fabric of his braccae dampening under her eyes, but he did not chide her for weeping.

“But I would ask you, my love, to try to bear it better... for our son. He may not remember his sister. He will remember a tearful mother, and for now he has no sibs whose hearts he might lean on. I do not know how I could comfort him against that. I am but a soldier and a farmer, Cottia — and Esca about the same.”

 _Perhaps not about the same,_ she thought, but she nodded, her throat too thick to speak, and blotted her eyes against the sleeve of her tunic.

More moments passed, as her breathing fell to normal and he caressed the bright plaits that crowned her head. Then his hand slipped down to rest against her cheek, and his fingertips were under her jawline, lifting her head, as they had done one bright spring day in his uncle’s garden.

His eyes, when she met them, were open, sweet, dark.

“Do you come to bed with me,” he whispered.

She nodded, and rose from the floor. He took her hand in his, and he doused the lamp before they slipped from the chamber.

_Aprilis_  
 _Anno Quarto_  
 _132 CE_

The next spring, Esca reached into Procella and drew out a foal; and Constantia reached into Cottia and drew out Rhiain.

“I told Esca the name,” Marcus said as he brushed the thick black locks out of his new daughter’s screwed-shut eyes, “and he asked me drily if you were intent on breeding up the royalty of a new clan. It was an odd jest, I’d no idea what to say to it.”

“Her name. It means a queen,” Cottia said. “That’s all. It is not an uncommon one.”

“ _Regina_ ,” Marcus said softly. The British and Latin tongues had their commonalities, and they betimes caught his imagination.

She thought of _Camilla_ , but she shook the thought away. Romans did not name their children king or queen. “ _Sa_ , _regina_ ,” she said.

“I should think that a little queen and her warrior mother merit some attendants,” Marcus said. “It is long past time that you had a few girls about to help you, and we can well afford it now, I would say.”

The girls’ names were Britivenda and Enica; they were daughters to different women who had worked for Constantia in years past. Britivenda was twelve and energetic, dark-brown curls spilling about bright brown eyes in a delicate and cheerful face. Enica was perhaps two years older, thin and nearly as tall as Cottia, sandy hair framing mobile features somewhat too boyish and angular for prettiness. Her eyes, a clear blue, were wide and serious.

Both girls worked hard and earnestly, but it was Enica who made Cottia understand why Constantia took girls in. One could not mould another woman’s half-grown daughter as one could one’s own children, but, if the girl were keen of mind, one could teach her.

“A good job you make, of flavouring the brew,” she said, her hand on Enica’s shoulder, the ghost of Deieda’s from nearly two years ago on her own. “It’s as great a help to me at market as is your lifting of the jugs for me until I can lift them again myself. You saw how well they sold, didn’t you?”

Enica’s face reddened, and of a sudden she stared down at her own hands. “I did, _domina._ ”

“You have a good sense for that, just as you have a good sense for what herbs to add to dishes.” Cottia chuckled. “You will certainly surpass me as a cook one day, and you may even surpass me as a brewer.”

Enica looked too startled to be embarrassed now. “Thank you, _domina_.”

Cottia was not long in recovering from Rhiain’s birth. The light of spring, cresting toward the brilliance of Midsummer, gave her joy and energy, even if Midsummer would always carry for her a bittersweet memory. Her labours, as always, strengthened her in body and in mind.

But it was this spring that she began to perceive new things, unsettling things. There were tides that washed around her, undertows that pulled at her. She realised that they were there; moreover, she realised that they had been there for a while, building like a slow, slow wave.

For so long as she had known Marcus, she had known Esca. Where the one went, the other did too. She’d ever truly fixed on the one, for longer than she had been old enough to even contemplate him in her bed.

It was a piece of irony, that the slighter man cast so much longer a shadow than the taller one, that the darker one outshone the fairer one… but that was Marcus Flavius Aquila. If he were not tumbling every fourth woman on the Downs, as Angharad had asserted of Esca, it was because he had no wish to. Cottia saw how other women reacted to him; even matrons could be reduced to a blush and a stammer in the presence of a living legend. If he were not precisely handsome, as either Romans or Britons reckoned handsomeness, still he was not difficult to gaze upon.

It would have been unkind, and not exactly true, to describe Esca as having simply been…. _there_ to her. Without him, Marcus would still be an invalid in Calleva, or perhaps his bones would be mouldering in a cold Northern glen. But, slave or freedman, he had never drawn Cottia’s eye as a man.

Until the day he came to her by the side of the stream.

For a long time she barely registered the change, and for a longer time still she could outright deny it. But enough droplets will wear away the stoniest resistance, and by the time she woke to the tides they could have cut channels through mountains of granite.

She realised, with shame, that she … _noticed_ Esca, now, the way she had before noticed only Marcus. Esca’s hair, sparking with flame to match her own when the sun moved out from behind the clouds. Esca’s hands, the sinews in them flexing as he deftly whittled a toy for Flavius or Rhiain. Esca’s shoulder blades, sliding back and forth rhythmically under the blue swirls of ink as he wielded a scythe or an axe. Esca’s thighs, pressed tightly against the flanks of a horse.

Esca’s lips. When he spoke, when he smiled, when he sipped wine. Even when he pressed them to the top of Flavius’s curly head, or Rhiain’s smooth glossy one.

Worse, much worse, was when she wrapped her legs around Marcus’s hips or tucked her feet under his knees, and she stared into his dark eyes but saw grey ones staring back. When Marcus whispered, “Spend for me, _dulcis_ ,” and she heard the ghost of a Brigantes accent twist itself round the words.

Worst of all was when she responded to her own unbidden imaginings — flood-wet, crying out, shaking hard — and Marcus pulled her to him with overflowing tenderness and no idea that she had just spent herself upon him while thinking of another.

Roman poetry and British song alike spoke of the bitter longing for another who does not return one’s desire, a longing that rends the heart. And that, thought Cottia, must be hard. But, in the name of all the gods, she wished she pined alone.

She did not, and she knew it.

Outwardly, they were no different to one another. They spoke with affection, they spoke of the business of the farm, they spoke of all the people who made up their world. But, as often as she caught herself staring at Esca, she caught him staring at her.

He was never bold with it, any more than she was. But it was not infrequent that she would raise her head from a task and catch a flicker of grey, sharp with hunger, turning away from her, the mouth beneath it a line of regret. When she stood at his side to serve him at dinner, his body was tense, his breath measured, as if only by force of will did he not pull her to him, and she could see his pulse beating hard in his throat.

She was not flattered. She was, when she allowed herself to think about it, terrified. She wondered when the unspoken would be spoken, when one of them would not be strong enough to walk away from the other. It would be the first strand to be pulled out of the life they had all woven together, and every other strand would follow.

_Iunius_  
 _Anno Quarto_  
 _132 CE_

It was but a few weeks later when Marcus told them, over dinner, that he would be journeying north again.

Cottia’s spoon clattered onto the table.

He laughed. “I don’t intend to retrace all of our steps, Cottia. I won’t even ride so far beyond the Wall, this time. Guern lived three days’ ride from it, more or less.”

Esca’s head came up sharply. “Have you had word from him?”

Marcus shook his head. “No. But… we owe him a great deal, and I have been thinking for a few years now that I should like to find him again. To bring him some of our mead and barley-beer, some wool, maybe a fine tunic from Cottia’s needle, a few other gifts, and sit with him and tell him how we fared in the end. And if the Epidaii did find him and take their vengeance, then I should like to bring these gifts to his woman and children, who might be in need and who might be comforted to hear stories of him.”

The roaring in Cottia’s ears made it hard to hear Marcus. She did not dare look at Esca.

“Esca,” Marcus said. “I will miss you on this journey, which by all rights you should make with me… but the villa cannot spare both of us.”

Esca took a breath.

“I remain the Centurion’s Hound. Much as I long to journey with him, I am honour-bound to lie at the feet of his lady now, and to guard her and their children.” He stopped. Cottia, still not looking at him, had a sense that his throat was tight, but she did not know whom he feared for more — Marcus, or himself and her. She looked instead at Marcus, and her own throat caught at how lovingly he gazed back at Esca, and as if he, too, were too overwhelmed to speak.

Finally he said, “I will be back well before the harvest. I cannot imagine how I wouldn’t. If the territory is said to be unsafe nowadays, I can arrange a few men from the garrison at the Wall to come along. Or perhaps there’ll be no shortage of fame-addled striplings there, clamouring to accompany me _gratis_.” The last, he said with a chuckle and a shake of his head.

Then he looked up at Cottia. “You’ll be fine without me for the while. You manage well, and you have the girls to help you now. And, of course, you will have Esca.”

That she knew he would end with that did not make it easier to hear.

It took but a few days to ready him for the journey. Cottia set aside jugs of mead and beer for Guern, and a jar of honey-in-the-comb as well. She could not very well sew a tunic for a man she had never seen and whose measurements none of them could take, but she would send along with Marcus some good woollen thread, linen, and a few needles for the woman Murna.

At last, he stood before the house, a stable lad behind him holding the reins of a well-laden Cornix, the girls standing behind Cottia with their hands respectfully clasped before them. He ruffled the fur on Cub’s head and back. Then he embraced Esca roughly. Cottia, watching them part, found her throat swelling again.

Then Marcus took her hands and pulled her to him. She stared blindly over his shoulder, clutching his arms that braced her, feeling his heart pound under his tunic, smelling the calamus oil and salt on him. She wondered if she might never smell these things against his skin again. She thought then that she almost certainly would, but wondered if they would be no longer a joy but a rebuke because by then she would have pressed her lips to the skin of another man.

They watched him ride away, she and Esca and Enica and Britivenda, until he and Cornix were a dot on a far hill, and then not even that.

And then she turned without speaking and walked back into her house.

She threw herself into the work that was always there to be done. Because it had to be done, and because she needed, more than anything, her hands and her mind to be full and her body too tired for anything but sleep at night.

_Iulius_  
 _Anno Quarto_  
 _132 CE_

Cottia set the stylus down and rubbed her shut eyes, cursing softly. They were sore from the lateness of the hour, the dim light, and the drying effect of the nearby candle flame. But these days it was easier to keep the accounts after the children had gone to sleep.

She heard foot-falls about her, but she was too annoyed to think on them until a cup appeared at her elbow. She looked up, startled.

“I thought you’d be gone for the evening.”

“ _Na,_ not this night,” Esca said, setting another cup on the desk, then pulling a second chair up alongside it. In his other hand was a jug.

The anxious gnawing under her ribs returned, and on its heels a stab of anger. Would she spend the rest of her days slinking about her own villa? In fear of … what? A man who had never treated her with anything other than honour and kindness? Herself, when she had lived through things much worse than developing an untoward itch for her husband’s dearest companion?

She picked up the cup and took a long, hard draught. It was not wine; it was her own mead, and not much watered. She put it down with a mild thump on the table, blinking hard as the spirits hit her.

“Thought I needed that, did you?” she said.

 _“Sa,”_ he said as he filled his own cup. “You look fit to collapse over your tablets and sleep atop them all night.”

“I just about am, I think.”

“Could one of the girls, or I, not taken the little ones for a while?”

“ _Na_. Flavius misses his father dreadfully, and while he is awake he will not be gone from my sight until Marcus returns, even with you. Might as well have Rhiain with me the while.”

She took up the cup again and this time sipped, but the hearty pull she’d just taken had begun to do its work. She felt less tired than… _languid_ , was that the Latin word? There was a pleasant warmth in her cheeks, and of a sudden she couldn’t care overmuch about when the accounts got done.

Esca sat beside her with a cup of his own. He but sipped at it. “You have become a passing fair brewer, _domina_. I have not had such good mead in…” He paused. “Well, in a long time.”

 _Since before you were taken in chains,_ she thought, but she didn’t draw that shadow down onto their conversation. “I am glad you like it. Of a certainty, you are a better judge of it than Marcus is.”

He smiled. The candlelight glistened on his lower lip. It would taste of honey…

She blinked hard again and said, “How have you been faring, without Marcus about? I know he’ll be home by the harvest, perhaps before, but it’s hard work in hot weather for one man fewer.”

“Truth be told? Not badly.” He sipped again at the mead. “Better hot sun than pouring rain. And we’ve an industrious pack of field-lads this year, and they take me as Marcus’s second-in-command without question.”

“You’ve led men before.” A statement, not a question.

“I have. I would have become chieftain after my father.”

Questions pelted her mind, but she said nothing. She knew not quite how to tread here, and she wished to cause him no more pain.

Esca looked at her, smiling faintly. “You are comparing what I am now with what it was thought I might have become.”

His ability to read her unnerved her. She said, flatly and unconvincingly, “I do no such thing,” and stared in embarrassment at the table-top.

“Everyone does such a thing,” he scoffed. “Not everyone is polite about it. I’ve been asked some…” The corner of his mouth crooked. “Some questions that you’d think would shame the asker. But some folk have no shame.

“To answer your unspoken questions? I have a good life, Cottia. I am alive, I am hale, I do not want for food nor clothes nor a roof over my head. My clan is gone, but you and Marcus and the children are as good as that, now. I have… dear friends…” His face became still as he took her measure. “A child or two of my own blood, who know me and whom I help provide for.”

She was a bit surprised that he had told her, but not that it was true. When her expression did not change, he added, with another wry twist of his mouth, “And no-one trying to kill me for sport. And what I was taught as a lad stands me in good stead, in more ways than being able to oversee other men, which is not exactly an uncommon skill.” He laughed. “Who knows, perhaps, had the world turned out differently, I would have been slain young in battle, and my people would have sung of me, as Romans sing of Marcus.” He paused. “But I am alive, and I am here.”

She remained quiet; with good mead in her belly, she didn’t trust her own tongue. His seemed loosened enough, so she sat and gazed at him with a faint smile of encouragement and expectation.

He gave her a mischievous look. “Aren’t you going to ask who the babes’ mothers are?” _Mothers_ , plural.

She grinned. “Angharad is skilled at hiding her pregnancies from the rest of us, I see.”

Esca had been mid-drink when she spoke. His eyes widened and he choked on the mead, spluttering, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

“What, you have not been with her?” she asked, comically playing up her disbelief. “When—”

“—half the men of the Downs have?” he finished for her. “ _No._ Not even tempted.”

He spoke vehemently, and he wasn’t smiling now. Her own smile faltered.

This time he took not a sip but a long drink of the mead, then held her eyes for a moment without speaking. He seemed to be trying to gather words. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet but hard. They had been speaking in British, as they usually did when alone, but he now spoke in Latin.

“The first man who owned me, Cottia, was a wealthy man in Durovernum. He was aptly named Quintus Valerius Lupinus. The word ‘debauched’ would do him scant justice.” He stared ahead of himself now without appearing to see anything in the room. “I didn’t fear being … used by him or his… circle of friends. Their penchant was for girls — and I mean _girls_ , Cottia, not women. Even so … when he bought me, I was sixteen, and I suspect he would have considered me too old for him by, at the very _least_ , eight years.”

His last words were almost a snarl. The hair on Cottia’s nape stood up. She knew that many Roman men used small children in such a way, but it had always been to her an abstraction, a topic that she blessedly did not need to consider.

“He was quick to lash out, both with his hands and with an actual lash. I hated him, I quite honestly hope he’s dead and that he died slowly and in pain, but I didn’t truly fear him. I feared his wife. Her name was Luciana Terentia.”

He looked at her again. “Cottia — Angharad is very fair. Luciana was _astonishing_. People, not only men but also women and children, would gape at her when she appeared in public. I once saw her reduce a well-spoken senator to a stammering boy without speaking a word, simply smiling at him from her place by Lupinus’s side. And she was, easily, the most terrifying person I have ever met. Only seeing my kin slain before me and being taken for auction were more frightening to me than the attentions of Luciana Terentia.” He took another long pull of mead.

“What did she do to you?” Cottia whispered, in Latin as well.

“The same thing she did to every other male slave in that household. When Lupinus wasn’t about, she would walk up to a man or a boy and begin to converse with him, lightly. Before long the topic would change to what she wanted to do to him in her bed, what she wanted him to do to her, speculation about his skills or his body, in words that would peel the murals from the walls of a _lupanar_. She would ask him if he liked her suggestions. What was he to say except ‘I am at your disposal, _domina_ ’ or the like? Her face would absolutely _glow_ at the mixture of terror and lust she’d inspired in him — and if he were wearing braccae, the latter would be obvious, and she would point that out too.

“If she were feeling especially … inspired, she would drop reminders of her ability to have him punished, and she would describe the punishments in as much detail as she described anything else. And _that_ seemed to arouse her more than any other subject did. I would swear that when she departed from her victim after that sort of one-sided conversation, it was to go back to her bed-chamber and—” He broke off, still holding Cottia’s eye, and coloured slightly. “—and bring herself off.”

Cottia didn’t blush. She had no blood left in her cheeks at all.

“She was mad, then?”

“No,” he said flatly. “She was not. Outside of those incidents, there was nothing to mark her as such. To anyone other than the slaves of that household, or slaves of other households with whom they gossiped, she appeared calm, dignified, and restrained. A proper Roman matron.” Those last words, he spoke with leaden irony.

“Did… did anything ever come of her … threats?”

“Of her threats? No, not precisely. But…” He drank again. “There was… an incident. She took a fancy to one slave in particular, probably a little older than I was then. He was very beautiful himself, and her attentions went well beyond toying with him lightly. She eventually cajoled him, or threatened him, or both to get him into her bed — and that’s where Lupinus found them. He had been drinking elsewhere in the house with three of his equally vicious friends. I don’t know why he came to her chamber just then. But the four of them hauled the poor wretch into a courtyard, stripped him naked, suspended him from a tree limb with a weight attached to his feet, and took turns laying into him for hours.”

He turned and looked at her; his eyes were hard, and so were his next words. “With a _plumbata_.”

Cottia made a strangled noise.

Esca’s face was stark white, and he looked ill. “I and two others had the unforgettable pleasure of cleaning up after them. For a mercy, though, I drew the long straw. I spent all night digging the hole at the edge of Lupinus’s land.”

“Did he divorce his wife, after that?” she asked hoarsely.

He shook his head. “No. She came of a powerful gens, and Lupinus needed her father’s money and influence. That’s not all of it, though. None of us knew the details, nor wanted to, but it was understood that Luciana knew much, much more about certain things Lupinus had done than he would have liked her to know. I imagine she had these things written down somewhere and told him as much, to dissuade him from murdering her.

“Also…” This time he emptied the cup, as if to fortify himself, and continued: “Even had her father disowned her for _infamia_ , she had at least one brother, wealthy and powerful in his own right, who would have yet…” He turned to Cottia with a meaningful look. “… _embraced_ her. Who was said to have done so regularly, in fact, and with her joyful consent.”

Cottia swallowed hard. This time she was the one who picked up her cup and took a long swig.

Esca expelled a sharp breath as if he’d been holding it in all evening. “Cottia, there are no words to express how relieved I was to have eventually displeased Lupinus enough that he sold me — to an Army garrison-master. I took no end of beatings and insults in that garrison. But whatever two-legged wolves it held had little interest in me. And there were no two-legged cats.” She remembered Aeolus and the mouse, and Esca turning away in revulsion.

There was a brief silence between them. Then he looked into his cup as if to conjure it once more full, and he spoke in British again.

“I… have not spoken of this to anyone, not since I left Lupinus’s house. It is something I would be all too happy to forget entirely. I bring it up with you because you spoke of Angharad. I do not want to claim that the one is no different from the other — I doubt Angharad has done even a tenth of what Luciana has — but the one reminds me of the other.”

He turned to look at her again. “Angharad did once try to bed me. I was at her and her husband’s villa on business to do with horses, and she approached me in the stable when he was in the house. I told you I wasn’t even tempted, and I didn’t lie. Have you ever seen a windfallen apple that looked sweet and ripe enough to eat, but you knew if you turned it over with your toe the underside would be a-crawl with worms? I was polite to her, tried to flatter her to soften the blow, but the look in her eyes… “ He shuddered.

Cottia blinked. “She is a piece of work, to be certain, but… you compare her to a monster. Are you sure of this?”

His expression did not change, although his eyes hardened again. “I cannot say she is a complete monster. I do not know her well enough, and... by the Fiery Spear, I dearly _hope_ there is never another creature on earth like the wife of the man I once served. All I can say is that I seem to have inherited my father’s ability to reckon character, and what training I had, for judging disputes, helped to sharpen it.”

His hand was of a sudden wrapped around her wrist firmly, his eyes drilling into hers. “I have nothing of which to accuse her, but… Cottia, I beg you, do you watch your back with that one.”

She blinked again but said nothing. He released her wrist, picked up the jug, uncorked it, and poured for himself. “More for you as well?”

She shook her head — she hadn’t finished her own mead — and stared down at the desk. Her flesh still prickled and her stomach fluttered. She would rather die than tell him so, but she wished to all the gods that Esca had not told her that story, nor drawn that comparison.

He took another drink, watching her, and his expression became faintly abashed, as if he knew the burden he’d laid on her and regretted it.

“So… you like the mead, do you?” she said, haltingly.

Relief washed through his face like a wave; it was almost comical. “I do.”

She began to speak of how she gathered the honey and brewed the mead. She always enjoyed talking of how useful and pleasant things were made, a conversation that away from Constantia’s she tended to have only with Enica, and by necessity that was rather one-sided. He had never seemed greatly interested in this matter before — men seldom cared about the intricacies of what women did, anyway, only that it got done — but he seemed to attend closely to her words now. As she spoke, she sensed the tension unspooling from him, and she regained some ease as well.

When that subject had played itself out, she said, “So… Your children’s mothers. You did say mother _s_ , not mother, _sa?_ ”

His mood quieted again. “ _Sa._ Mothers. One of my son, the other of my daughter. If I have other children, their mothers have not seen fit to tell me,” he added. He seemed perfectly aware of what else he had just revealed, and he did not smile to make a jest of it.

“Would I know these women?”

He spoke two names. The first Cottia did not recognize. The second she did.

“Ffion? Dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale-complected, quiet?”

“ _Sa_ , that’s her.”

Cottia remembered Ffion sitting beside her in the great atrium, deftly redirecting the conversation away from the subject of Esca.

“I haven’t seen her in a long while,” she said.

“She went to live with her sister and her sister’s husband after our daughter was born. They have an even smaller villa than this one, but there was work for her there, plus of course the child would have kin about her. Ffion is a creature of solitude anyway; I don’t think she liked being at Constantia’s much, even if she got on well there with the rest of you.”

Not knowing why, she asked, “What drew you to her?”

He looked a bit startled but he grinned at her all the same. “She has a fair face, a good heart, and a wit like the edge of a sword. Do I need any other reasons?”

Chin atop folded hands, she held his gaze for a moment, her desire muted with a queer sort of humility. So much under the placid surface. A man who, had his life taken another turn, could have been as much to his own people as Marcus was to Rome — and he had seen fit to trust her this night, including with things he had never told another soul. How much had passed over her head, by her eagle-dazzled eyes, all these years?

Before she could drop her eyes, he reached out and laid his palm against her cheek. His voice dropped to a whisper.

“And, still, Cottia, I need no other reasons.”

Her heart stopped, then began to hammer. Her mouth and eyes were wide, her hands trembling about her cup. The moment she had long dreaded was upon her. It brought terror, but, much more, it brought a piercing joy.

She couldn’t tell, afterward, who stood first and who leant into the other. All she knew was that of a sudden they were both on their feet, and her arms were about Esca’s shoulders and his own about her waist and, yes, his lips did taste of honey, and of spirits, and of … she knew not what else. Him, himself, as distinct from other men? The thoughts that went through one’s mind… _when one is preparing to dishonour one’s marriage bed..._

She drove the thought from her head by driving herself into him, tightening her arms about his neck, pressing her mouth harder against his, despite how she gasped for breath. He moaned softly against her lips and returned her ferocity, his tongue seeking hers. Her nipples felt as though they were digging into his chest through her stola — all she wore on this warm night — and his tunic. She could certainly feel his hardness against her thigh, and, there, too, she pressed, thrust, barely kept herself from rubbing herself up and down against it with wanton abandon.

His hands cupped her buttocks through her stola, and she broke the kiss to cry out against his shoulder. Then, on an impulse, she took his lower lip between hers and sucked hard at it, as if to suck all the honey from it, before she let it slip away through her own lips. The grey of his eyes had already dwindled to slender rings about wide black centres; now he looked as though he might spend where he stood. The thought left her mouth as dry as sand.

His hands rose. She thought he would cup her breasts, but, no, they went to the nape of her neck, and his fingers curled into her plaits. Before she realised what he did, he had unpinned them, then untwined them, and his hands were full of long, loose, bright hair, as if he were a god who could cup living flame in his palms.

“This?” he said, soft and hoarse, as he mouthed the lobe of her right ear. “This needs to be laid out over my pillow, Cottia. It has needed to be for so, so long.”

Her legs began to shake. He caught her before she could fall, and she clung to him. His hands under her elbows, his eyes fixed on hers, he drew her out of the counting-room, across the atrium, down the eastern colonnade, past her and Marcus’s chamber, past the nursery, into the small bare room that contained a simple bedstand, and washing-table, and trunk, and nothing else. The moon was up, and through his window it and the stars cast a faint light over all.

She stumbled from his grasp onto the rug that covered the straw mattress, half-sitting, half-lying. Esca was beside her quickly, letting the bed bear his weight but covering his torso with hers. He buried his mouth in the side of her neck, making her whimper and her eyes start out of her head with delicate, maddening touches of his tongue and lips and teeth. Her hand found itself fisted in his hair; she registered somewhere in her mind that it was softer and finer than her own.

His free hand had been at her waist. Now it slid up to cup her breast, and his fingertips chafed the linen about her straining nipple. She cried out and writhed against him forcefully. He groaned and sought her lips again with his and pushed her onto her back, covering her more fully now, and he slid one thigh into the stola-covered space between her own. Without even thinking, she closed her thighs about his, about his hips and ground upward and into him, seeking the hard spot that gave them both so much pleasure when she found it…

He rose up slightly from her, breathing hard, eyes nearly all black in the dim light.

“Your stola… it’s a bit of an impediment, right now.”

She laughed, low but a bit nervously. She had kissed Esca passionately. Then she had lain in his bed. Now she would be naked before him. But she could not imagine stopping now.

She stood, facing him, waiting as his careful, patient fingers undid the ribbon beneath her breasts, then the _succingulum_ about her waist. Then he leant forward, almost reverently, to grasp the hem of the stola, and he raised it up, up, over her thighs, her hips, her waist, her breasts, her shoulders. Her head.

He let it fall to the floor, and he sat on the edge of the bed, holding her wrists loosely, eyes tracing and retracing the soft pale curves and lines that made up Cottia. She could feel his pulse racing in his fingertips. She expected him to pull her down on top of him. Her breath caught in her throat when he fell to his knees before her; he encircled her waist with his arms and pressed his face into her child-softened belly. His eyes were closed, his face rapturous.

Then he opened his eyes onto her face, and she shuddered in his grasp. There was a ferocity to them that went well beyond desire. She remembered his words to herself, then to Marcus: _I am honour-bound to lie at the feet of his lady now_. Her hands rested on his shoulders, then on either side of his face.

“You are still clad, Esca. This is greatly unfair to me.”

Her voice quavered on the jest, but it broke the spell. He laughed, almost soundlessly, and released her. He rose to his feet, and in one smooth movement he pulled his tunic over his head, dropping it to the floor beside the stola. She ran the flats of her palms over his chest, over the fine light whorls of russet hair. He hissed between his teeth, shaking slightly, as they passed over his nipples, small and stony, then slid down his hard flat belly.

She looked up at him, her face deceptively placid, as she raised her right hand to her mouth and, slowly and deliberately, licked her thumb. Then she dropped the hand back down, slid it between his body and his braccae. Her fingers closed around his rigid cock, and, her eyes still fixing his, she drew her wet thumb decisively across the head. He gasped, hard, and her name came out of him in a tremulous exhalation.

He eased his braccae off — and then, this time, he did pull her down onto him onto the bed. Between the gentle guidance of his hands and some sort of instinct, she found herself on her back, hair radiating out across his pillow as he’d told her he wanted, one leg drawn up.

He lay half on his side, half over her, and took her mouth with his again. His free hand slid slowly down her neck and continued, briefly gliding around each breast before continuing downward, over ribs and belly, and then, almost unbearably, to the right. His fingertips were describing lazy arcs against her inner thigh when she began to whimper against his mouth and arch her back, seeking more, ever more.

He broke off the kiss and raised his head, watching her eyes. Of a sudden his fingertips were gliding up and down the cleft of her cunt. She closed her eyes and groaned, and she heard him catch his breath, then felt it hot against her ear. “Like the Cluta in spate,” he whispered, with a hitch to the last word that might have been the ghost of a laugh. “I wonder… would I drown in it?”

He moved over her, and she drew her knees apart, certain of what he intended… but she had misguessed. His mouth, against her neck and collarbone, began to follow the path his fingers had just taken.

Just as she had taken Marcus into her mouth so many times, Marcus had often caressed her _landica_ with his lips and tongue, while thrusting fingers in and out of her to make her ready to receive him. But Marcus had never curled his fingers upward, seeking … she did not know _what_ Esca sought, at first, but when he found it, it drove the breath out her. It felt as though her entire belly was contracting around his hand, as if she could pull him into her entirely.

Her own fingers curled into his hair, holding him to her and lifting her hips against him as with fingers and tongue he stroked the most hidden, sharpest parts of her. Before long she went very still and rigid, then began to shake like a branch in a gale. He held to her, almost rode her, as he brought her over her threshold, stopping only just before the sensation became too keen for her to bear.

Flat on her back she lay, panting, eyes not really seeing the ceiling above her, when she felt him move upward, over her. She grabbed, blindly, at his shoulders and forearms as he settled between her knees, her fingers digging in and pulling him down.

She wound her ankles round his legs and rocked back and forth hard between his body and the bed. Her fingertips pressed hard enough into his upper arms to leave bruises. When he kissed her again, hard and fierce, she sought his lower lip again and this time bit it just hard enough to hurt. Her mouth muffled his cry; she could feel him throb inside her in response, and she tightened herself around him, repeatedly.

When she began to feel him tremble above her, as she had trembled shortly before, she caught his eye and held it, and then she whispered, “Esca. Spend. Spend for me, _annwyl_.”

His eyes closed. His arms went tight around her, as if she might flee, and he drove himself into her once, twice, three times. The third time he cried out, softly, but with a timbre that twisted in her belly, and he shuddered against her as he spent. She could not peak again so hard, so soon after he had left her so drained with his mouth and his fingers, but she let the soft wave of pleasure wash through her.

Until sleep eventually claimed them, the world was a small, quiet refuge made of warm skin, shining eyes, and the softest of caresses.

 

As was her wont, she stirred at the earliest touch of the sun on her closed eyes.

There was the first moment’s disorientation: the strange angle of the light, the bareness of the room, the shape of the back that was turned to her. And then the remembering, the flush of pleasure with its shadow of guilt.

She would have to rise soon, very soon. But it needn’t be in the next second, she thought.

Esca’s breath was steady; she watched the blue spirals on his shoulder blades rise and fall with it. As she focused and the room grew brighter, she could see freckles under the sun-darkened skin. Also the pink, unnaturally smooth rows that crossed the middle of his back, so many that they blurred into one another. She thought of Lupinus and the garrison-master, and a knot of anger tightened and burned in her chest.

Leaning forward, she softly brushed her lips against the old scars. Esca came awake with a start and a gasp, but in the next breath he was facing her, arms about her and mouth against hers.

“Not dreaming,” he said against her ear with barely any voice.

“Nor I.”

He had begun to harden against her thigh when she heard Flavius call for her, and a voice hushing him. They moved apart with a sigh unison and soft, rueful laughter.

“Too much to expect,” Esca said.

 _“Sa.”_ She sat on the edge of the bed and retrieved her stola from the floor, then stood, jumping a little and laughing quietly when he reached out and stroked the curve of her arse. The stola fell back over her, his eyes tracing its descent with fond regret. He lay on his back, naked and quite unself-conscious; Cottia resisted the impulse to reach out to his half-hard cock and return his caress.

“Mean you to lie in bed all day?” she jested, soft-voiced.

He grinned and replied as quietly, “If you agreed to join me, I might be tempted to. But I suspect we would be missed. I also suspect it would be wise for you to leave this room without me while you still can do so unremarked.”

“Wise, indeed.” And then she had no idea what to say, at least not in words.

He understood; his impish expression faded away at once, and the urge to ask him if she could, after all, tempt him in that manner was overwhelming. But then his mouth quirked. “ _Go,_ would you?” He reached behind his head for the pillow, which he flung at her. “I’m not made of stone, _domina_ — much as it may look that way!”

Shaking with suppressed laughter, she opened the door quietly and slipped out of it. Her laughter froze and splintered within her to see Enica in the hallway with Flavius in her arms, the girl’s clear eyes large in the dim dawn light.

“Mama!” Flavius cried.

“ _Domina_ ,” Enica whispered, lowering her eyes. The same word, such a different shape.

“Good morning, Enica,” Cottia heard herself say, with calm and dignity, as if she hadn’t just been caught leaving the chamber of her husband’s most cherished friend, hair wild and yesterday’s stola on her. “Shall I take Flavius?” The girl nodded without lifting her head, not so much handing Flavius over to Cottia as letting him be taken from her.

Flavius was soft and clean-smelling in Cottia’s arms, the softness and clean smell both comfort and rebuke. Cottia bent her head to kiss his smooth cheek, crooning to him. When she lifted her head a few seconds later, she and he were alone in the hallway.

 

“Enica knows,” Cottia said quietly that afternoon, on her knees beside the ewe.

Esca, grooming Cornix just then, drew in a long breath and his back straightened.

“Will she say anything to anyone?”

“I… I don’t know, Esca. I don’t think she will. But we must be careful. Very careful.”

His head came up. She thought perhaps he was staring off into the distance. Then she realised he was staring at the stack of hay against the back wall.

“At the back of that pile,” he said, “there is a small hollow space. Not as comfortable as a bed. But safer.”

Cottia’s heart began to pound. She thought at first it must be fear. She realised it was not.

On the next morning, they met inside the hollow.

Drink and longing had driven them the first night. Now, fear and a simple, blind lust did. He pulled off his own clothes and she hers, no time or patience for undressing as love-play. Fingers sunk bruisingly hard into flesh, mouths mashed against one another, teeth raked and clipped lower lips, one back or the other slammed against the inner wall of the barn, hips worked vengefully until each of them had shuddered and muffled a cry against the other.

Even his kisses afterward as they lay on the straw were hard, possessive — and terrified. She returned the force with both hands entwined in his hair, rocking her body against his as if neither of them had just spent a moment ago. He rose against her thigh again, and she ground herself against his cock until he groaned and pushed her down on her back. His mouth on her nipples was hard, even before he set his teeth into them, and his fingers between her thighs chafed her _landica_ until she was yelping and, on the other side of the hollow, Aeolus yowled in sympathetic distress. Esca shifted his hips to where his fingers had been and entered her roughly as if there were no glossy wetness there. He fucked her hard, she rose up to meet him equally hard, hands on his arse and pulling him down hard against her, until he gasped and spent a second time, and still she would not release him from the yoke of her legs until he grit his teeth in discomfort and pushed up and away from her.

He stood, then, and swiped at his soft cock with a piece of linen he had brought with him before he began to draw on his braccae. He didn’t look at her. Aeolus yowled his displeasure again; Esca's shoulders stiffened in response.

Cottia sat up, straws in her hair, Esca’s seed leaking from her into the hay. She was unsure whether she felt more shame or anger as she watched him dress, then disappear from the hollow without a word to her.

In the afternoon, she came in again to tend to the animals. He stood before Cornix’s stall; he did not cease to comb and murmur to the horse, but his shoulders grew stiff again. Aeolus growled from a distant corner. Cottia said nothing and went to the cow.

When she felt a hand on her shoulder, she jerked her head up and glared at him. She felt coldly vindicated when he recoiled, pulling back his hand as if her shoulder were hot iron.

“Did you _intend_ that I would feel like a whore afterward?” she said tightly but quietly.

He sighed. “No. Cottia… I am sorry. If it helps, I felt about as worthy as you did.”

“It doesn’t.”

He made no reply.

“Esca…” She drew a deep breath. “What we do is grave. Gravely wrong, gravely dangerous. If it is nothing but a moment of release and a sea of self-reproach, there is no point in it, at all.”

“I know,” he said quietly, looking off into a dark corner of the barn.

Into the ponderous silence she said, “Let us stop. For now. The Lady help me, I should tell you ‘Let us stop for good,’ but … at least, let us stop until we can do anything but rut like beasts in the hay.”

He flinched, but he said nothing, simply nodded and turned away from her.

 

It lasted all of three days.

Three days of tension that thrummed between them like her bees, not just lust and fear but a dull, thwarted anger with no proper target. Enica, already bow-taut with the secret she kept, picked up the new tension and vibrated with it, too. To watch her serve or sit with rigid shoulders and eyes that dared not meet either Cottia’s or Esca’s set a yoke of stones across her mistress’s shoulders. A reliable girl, a clever girl, but a girl nonetheless, too unseasoned to be made to bear up under the folly of her elders.

Cottia doubted Enica had said anything to Britivenda, but the rest of them were making the younger girl uneasy, too, as anyone not made of stone would have been. Rhiain was too small to pick up on any of it, but Flavius fidgeted uneasily at table, and even Cub shied away from all of them. The evening meal was a seemingly endless torment of near-silence, and each of them fled the triclinium as soon as satiation of hunger permitted. Whichever girl was tasked with clearing the table would return later to do it.

On the third day, Esca was not about, having gone out to a neighbour’s villa to assist with an ailing horse. The barn would never be the innocent haven it had once been to Cottia, but a little of that sense came back to her as she entered it alone for the first time in weeks.

Procella’s head went up in her stall and her ears flicked in greeting as Cottia approached her. Cottia pulled a bit of dried apple from a fold in her stola, the last apple set away the autumn past. As the mare snuffled and nibbled at the tid-bit, Cottia found solace in scratching the top of Procella’s head. When the apple was gone, she leant her face against the warm grey neck, then curled her arms about it. The horse stood steadily, unfazed by neither the damp warmth that of a sudden touched the fine hairs of her neck nor the tremours of the two-legs who clung to her.

Cottia did not raise her head when she heard foot-falls behind her, which stilled into silence. _Leave me be_ , she thought. _This is your doing as much as mine, and I shall make no apologies to you._

She did not expect arms to wind about her body as hers were about Procella’s neck, and she stiffened. Esca, a warm solid shape against her back, said quietly at her ear, “I cannot bear this any more than you can.”

She found herself turned round, with her face now in the crook of his neck. They sank, entwined, to their knees. Cottia no longer sobbed but she grabbed his frame hard, like an anchor, and she did not think she could have broken the grip of his arms had the barn been on fire. She turned her face, and then they were kissing, hard and raw with frustration but also singing with something sweet and deep.

When it ended and her face was against his neck again, he said, “I love you dearly. As dearly as I love Marcus. I have spent the last three days thinking, and begging the gods for clarity… but the more I try to tease it all out, the more it all collapses before my eyes. I cannot. We have already betrayed him, and your elder girl knows, and there will be a grievous reckoning for us, I think… but, until then, I want to kiss you and touch you and be inside you for every moment we can possibly steal.”

Their mouths rejoined, and then, like a single creature, they shambled toward the hay-pile at the back of the barn. They were both sweat-damp from the heat of the day and from labours, and they both smelt of horse, and they were betraying their other best-beloved again, and none of it mattered as he tugged her stola over her head and she picked at the laces of his straining braccae.

_Usque ab Iuliuo ad Augustum_  
 _Anno Quarto_  
 _132 CE_

Raw and angry, deep and sweet. Perhaps if it were just them, no Marcus to betray — as if they would ever have met were it not for him — it would have been different. Perhaps if they had been joined at an altar, or handfasted, pouring out a libation of wine or mead to the gods that blessed marriage-beds.

There would never be a way to know.

Marcus had always been tender, so tender. Not all Roman men were so, she knew, but to their bed he brought the Roman ideal that love-making between man and wife was a holy thing, its pleasure a sacrament. Never once had his fingers bruised her or his teeth scored her. When he held her breasts or her buttocks or her hips or, when it swelled with child, her belly, his hands were as reverent as those of a priest around a grail. Of a certainty, some nights brought more rapture than others, as is the way of marriage, but on no night did he ever use her merely for release, as men often do their wives. If one or both of them were too tired for languourous love but unable to sleep before scratching the itch of desire, there was yet pleasure in it for her, as well as for him.

There was tenderness with Esca, to be sure, but it was admixed with a ferocity she had never tasted in Marcus’s bed. It was not the rough, clumsy ferocity of a stripling: Every touch of his, hands and mouth and cock, lent truth to the tales Angharad had borne. But there was a knife-edge of wildness to it, and she did not think it sprung entirely from the dangers of discovery or the lash of self-reproach.

As she rode Marcus, so some mornings she rode Esca, on his back in the straw. Esca had no lamed leg, and he was stronger through the shoulders and arms than was Marcus. Rather than simply let her take him, he would seize her hips tightly and meet her back-and-forth rocking with hard upward thrusts, eyes locked on hers. Her _landica_ would slide back and forth along the underside of his cock until she had to grit her teeth not to cry out as she shuddered atop him. His expression would soften as he watched hers, like an initiate witnessing a mystery, and then he would groan and hold her down tightly against his hips and spurt, seemingly endlessly, inside her.

One morning, when she first spied him in the shadows of the hay, there were something at the back of his eyes that went into her knees and made them tremble.

“Undress for me,” he said softly, in a voice softer than a whisper but harder than iron.

She hesitated. This was new. But she found no quarter in his look, and so she pulled off stola and undertunic and stood naked before him, while he remained clad.

He closed the few paces between them, and he ran one hand approvingly, possessively, over her, from cheek down neck, over breast, around hip, sliding down buttock and thigh. Then he moved back fractionally and set his hands to her head, his fingers moving quickly and roughly. Pins sprang away into the dim all about them, and the weight of her hair fell against her shoulders and spine.

He stepped back again. “Hands and knees.”

Her mouth made a _What?_ shape she dared not give voice to.

“You heard me.” No _Cottia_ , no _domina_. His eyes glinted.

Face flaming, she dropped slowly to her knees, then stretched out her back, palms down on the hay. Vulnerable and open, she felt as much the whore as she had the second time they had lain together, but there was a scalding excitement riding the shame that made her nipples stiffen painfully and the inside of her cunt pulse.

There was silence for a moment, except for their breaths quickening. Then she heard him shift, and she jumped slightly at the feel of a hand on her arse.

She could hear him breathing more heavily as he stroked her buttocks, then moved his fingertips inward to trace the outer lips of her cunt, then the soft ripe flesh they enclosed. With each gentle but insistent caress, more and more liquid pooled inside her. A fingertip dipped deeply into her to wet itself, then circle her _landica_ until she was unable to keep her hips from wriggling.

“I could do this for hours.” His voice was hoarse, and there was a tremour to it. “Just looking at you and touching you like this, displaying yourself so shamelessly. You trust me so much.” The wet fingertip slid upward and found the other opening to her body, stroking it ever so lightly until she groaned.

Then there were no hands on her at all. She heard the soft sounds of laces being undone, cloth being shifted. Then he was a warm and solid weight against her back and buttocks, and he was working himself into the swollen wetness he had created.

Marcus had never taken her like this before. Her eyes widened at how tight it made her, the heavy hard weight of his cock sliding so close against her clenching inner flesh that she imagined she could feel every ridge and vein. He anchored himself with an arm around her waist as he thrust, and his mouth busied itself against her nape and upper back. When she began to tremble in his grip, his free hand slipped beneath her and trapped her _landica_ between his fingertips again.

She managed not to fling the back of her head into his face but she couldn’t suppress a loud cry, her voice as deep as it had ever been outside of grief or anger. She could feel the sound hit Esca, could imagine it striking deep and hot in his belly, driving his seed into her with a last few thrusts and a sharp, gasping moan.

He pulled free of her as they rolled to their sides, her back pressed to him and his arms around her torso.

“Not that it wasn’t lovely to hear, but try not to scream the next time we do that, eh?” he growled in her ear, nipping the lobe sharply and eliciting a whimper from her.

“I promise you nothing,” she gasped.

_Augustus_  
 _Anno Quarto_  
 _132 CE_

They lay together in the same manner one morning, perhaps a month after the very first night, when she felt his hands slide downward and cup her belly. And felt his body stiffen behind her. And knew why.

“It is Marcus’s child, Esca,” she said softly.

He took a deep breath. She could feel him hover between relief and wariness.

“Are you sure of this?”

“I would not begin to swell this soon. My courses ceased before we ever lay together. Marcus’s seed took root again before he left for the North.”

He sagged against her back, and his arms wound about her tightly. “Thank all the gods,” he said roughly.

That was the afternoon Marcus came riding home.

From the window Cottia heard the hoof-beats, then a field-lad’s cry of “ _Domine!_ ”, before she saw the late afternoon sun striking blue gleams from Marcus’s hair and Cornix’s flanks. A russet head came up in the field and froze.

She stepped from the house just as Marcus drew Cornix up before it. His teeth flashed at her in a face bronzed with wind and sun.

“ _Dulcis!_ I have missed you!”

She smiled wanly. “And I you, Marcus.”

His grin broadened. “Do you?” He slid from the horse and caught her up in his arms. “You seem out of sorts; has my absence been a trial to you?”

“Phew! A long bath for you,” she said, forcing a note of laughter into her voice. “I am with child again, that is all. Sometimes it brings the melancholy; perhaps the child needs my other humours more.”

“Another babe! At this rate we will need a third wing of the house.” He laughed and kissed her forehead. “That is welcome news to return home to, Cottia. Let me speak with Esca; then I will make myself less offensive to your nose, and we shall have a fine supper of reunion with the children.”

The fine supper was not as awful as Cottia feared. Flavius gave a crow of delight to see his father, and Marcus, his hair still wet from the bath, gathered him up into his arms with a shout of joy and sat him on his knee. Into his other arm he took Rhiain, who cried a bit at the strange man holding her. Cub, who had nearly knocked Marcus over in joyful reunion shortly after he had greeted Cottia, now fairly draped himself over his master’s feet, preventing him from rising. Britivenda stayed by Marcus’s side to tend to the children. Cottia at first secluded herself in the kitchen with Enica, then came to table and spoke almost not a word.

Marcus was full of news from the North. Guern was as hale as a man of his age could be, and his family hale too. He now had a grandchild, the son of his son. Guern’s wife Murna had bid Marcus thank Cottia for her gifts and pass along praise for the quality of her brew. Cottia smiled genuinely at that. And then of course there was news of the Wall and the soldiers garrisoned within it, as well as of the tribes and clans who lived beyond it.

Occasionally Cottia stole a look at Esca, who pelted Marcus with questions. She thought she could perceive rue and fear flickering in his eyes here and there, but he mostly seemed relieved that Marcus had returned whole, and sharply curious about his travels. And their talk of the North seemed to rouse the bond they had built between the two of them in that wild, rough land.

In due time, their plates lay empty, and Enica was clearing them. Cottia raised her head to smile at the girl; the smile froze as she noted the tension in every line of the girl’s body, the blue eyes wide, her upper teeth set into her lower lip. Smoothly she turned her own head away.

“Enica,” she said, “will you put the children to bed when you are done?”

_“Sa, domina.”_

Neither man seemed to notice that neither mistress nor servant looked the other in the eye as she spoke.

“I am grateful that you could remain with Cottia and the children, Esca,” Marcus was saying, “but oh, I do wish you could have joined me, too.”

Esca was smiling; Cottia did not think Marcus caught the twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Truth be told, Marcus, I wish for the same.” He rose. “Well. I believe I shall be off for the night.”

Marcus grinned. “And whose bed do you warm this evening?”

Cottia’s heart lurched. Of course, it was an innocent question.

Esca’s expression did not change, although he seemed to pale somewhat. “None but my own, sadly. But there is always company at the _taberna_ , and sometimes it is even good company.” He smiled, then, a glad smile, though with a ghost of regret about it. “Welcome home, Marcus. We will speak more on the morrow.” And he turned on his heel and walked out.

Cottia watched his broad shoulders disappear in the waning light. Then she jumped, slightly, when Marcus took her hand. She turned to him and saw that his eyes had begun to darken.

“There is a bed here that has not been warmed often enough this summer,” he said softly, running his fingers over her wrist.

She knew he would come to her sooner, not later. She had expected to feel nothing but fear and guilt the whole while. Not the feel of her pulse jumping under his fingertips, the sudden ache in her nipples and the hot warmth washing from her belly downward. For that, she would bury a few coins on the morrow for the Lady, she thought.

By the end of the night she had quite forgotten about the coins.

There was nothing to fault in his love-making, she knew. He was, as always, tender to the point of reverence, skilled with her as only one who knew her body could be, and hungry for her after two months apart from her.

It was not enough.

She told herself that, with time, it would be. She knew better.

When she rose off his softening cock and eased herself down by his side, she let him think the shine in her eyes was that of joy.

 

She didn’t look up from the ewe’s hoof when Esca came into the barn the next morning.

She sensed, more than heard, him move about, other than his soft words to the horses as he tended to them. She continued to trim the ewe’s hoof, finished the job, and picked up a second hoof she knew to be perfectly fine and began to prod gently at it with the knife-tip.

When she realised she had not heard movement for a bit, nor had she heard him leave the barn, she raised her head. His expression, though shot through with longing, was infinitely sad.

“It is done,” she said quietly. “It must be.”

He did not quite sigh, but the breath seemed to leave him entirely, and he said, even more quietly, “I know.”

She dropped her eyes to the hoof again. She was sure he could tell she did not mean to actually trim it, but she doubted he would call that to her attention. Nor did he; he left the barn shortly thereafter.

She buried her moist eyes in the thick oily wool and held them there for a time.

_September_  
 _Anno Tertio_  
 _132 CE_

“Enica,” Cottia said gently.

The girl’s hands had been in a bowlful of berries; the bowl clattered against the table as she gave a start. Britivenda was out in the field, helping bring in the first of the harvest.

 _“Sa,_ _domina_?”

Cottia’s eyes flickered down to the table, briefly, and up to Enica’s wary blue gaze.

“I do not wish for you to feel discomfited here, but I have discomfited you. Would you be happier serving another mistress?”

Enica’s eyes widened in fear. “You will send me away?”

Cottia remembered Marcus in Uncle Aquila’s garden.

“ _Na,_ I will not send you away. I do not want to send you away. You work well and you work cleverly. But…” _I cannot bear your reproachful gaze on me._ Instead she said, “You know what happened, what you saw, that morning. If it is too much for you to bear and keep silent on, I would not wish to keep you.”

It was Enica’s turn to drop her eyes to the table-top. She seemed one rigid line of tension, from her feet behind the table to the bowed crown of her head.

“ _Domina_ … I do not want to leave you,” she said shakily. “You treat me well, you teach me useful things. But I take the coin of the _dominus_ , and I— I do not want to betray you, but nor do I want to lie to him.”

Cottia was silent for a moment. Then she said, “No, Enica. You take _my_ coin.”

The girl looked up at her, and she went on. “The mead and beer I brew, the cheese I make, the herbs and fruits and vegetables I grow — I take these to market. Did I not do so, we never would have been able to afford you and Britivenda here.”

She watched that fact turn over and over in the blue eyes, then added softly, “And, child… this is not your burden to bear. You are paid to help with the tasks of the farm and the care of the babes. You are not paid _nearly_ enough to act as my moral guardian.”

Enica’s mouth twitched a bit at this. Cottia realised how seldom the girl smiled.

“Do we understand each other?” she asked, her voice still quiet. The sandy head rose and fell three or four times. “Good.” She rested her hand over Enica’s in approval and affection — and jerked it away immediately when the girl’s face flamed bright red.

A question seemed to form itself in her mind, then came apart at once, as if she’d been trying to pick out shapes in swirls of morning mist. It was just as well, she thought; the voicing of it, whatever it was, would have earned her no honest answer.

_November_  
 _Anno Tertio_  
 _132 CE_

The light had begun to fade well before most of the sellers began to pack up their unsold goods for the day. Cottia would have liked to have done the same. Custom had been excellent earlier on: Romans, and Romanised Britons, were buying all manner of drink for Brumalia. But it had dropped off as the sun sank and the air grew teeth. She could not leave until Esca, who had hoped to sell Procella’s colt at market today, returned to her table.

After the first few awkward days in the wake of Marcus’s return, they two had come to something that passed well enough for peace. They spoke of farm business and of the children, and eventually they were able to chatter idly as well. The undercurrent of desire had never left them, but she supposed that would have been too much to hope for. The urge was suppressible; that would have to do. Perhaps in time their bodies would forget.

She pulled her mantle tighter round her swollen belly as she made a quick assessment of the jugs, cheese, and honey she had not sold. Not very much of it, she thought with satisfaction, just as a broad shadow fell over the table. She looked up and observed, “You’ve no colt with you.”

“Indeed I haven’t,” Esca said drily.

“Did he fetch a good price?”

“He fetched an _adequate_ price. The Dobunni who bought him was the sort you wouldn’t be surprised to see trying to bargain down a whore. I let him walk away, his first offer was that stingy. He wanted the colt badly enough to come back, and of course he had to change his tune then, but still it was no generous final offer. Just enough to make it more worthwhile than bringing the colt back to the villa for another week’s worth of fodder and care.”

“Ah, well, that’s something. Help me pack up the jugs that remain, would you?”

“Esca?” another voice said.

His head turned, and Cottia’s with his. The woman who had spoken was tall, at least a head taller than Esca, the hair pinned atop her head fair but grey-shot. At her elbow stood a man even taller than she and perhaps ten years her elder.

Esca blinked. Then his expression broke, slowly, into one of disbelieving joy.

“Berengard?”

The woman began to laugh. “I thought not to see you again in this life!”

She stepped toward him, and they clasped one another’s arms, then fell into an embrace. It did not seem like a meeting of old lovers to Cottia, not least because he who stood behind the tall woman had to be her husband, and he looked as bemused as Cottia was sure she did.

When they parted, Esca turned to Cottia, still smiling. “Berengard, this is Cottia, the wife of Marcus Flavius Aquila, my patron.”

Berengard’s pale brows shot up. “Marcus Flavius Aquila? Be there more than one man so named in Britannia?” She spoke Latin fluently, but with odd quirks of idiom and an accent Cottia had not heard before, an oddly clipped one.

Esca grinned at her. “If there is more than one such man in Britannia I do not know of the others.”

“Well. I know not how many slaves Aquila has freed in his time, but I reckon you have done well for yourself since last I saw you.”

“That would be a fair reckoning,” Esca said. “Cottia, this is Berengard. We… served together.”

Cottia’s head came up with a surge of understanding. She rather doubted they had served together in either the Army garrison or the arena.

“Ah,” she said, extending her arm. “Well met, _domina_.”

The tall woman offered Cottia her own arm and a warm smile. Cottia imagined she was not often called by that title. “You as well, _domina_. This is my man, Ientumaros,” she said. Ientumaros nodded politely to Cottia, then clasped arms with Esca.

“Forgive my impertinence, _domina_ ,” Cottia said, “but your accent is not familiar to me. Are you of Britannia?”

“No, I am of the Suevi, _domina_.”

At Cottia’s blank expression, Esca said quietly, “ _Germanica_.”

“Ah,” Cottia said again.

“How fare you?” Esca asked. “You seem… happy.”

Berengard smiled. “I am. Ientumaros is stable-master to Lucius Faucius of Noviomagus, who bought me a few years gone. After Ientumaros was freed, he saved enough coin to buy my freedom as well, and we were wed. Faucius was a good master and is a good patron to us.”

There was a slight crease over Esca’s brow, but he said nothing. Of a sudden Berengard darted a look at Cottia, her expression now wary.

“She knows the tale,” Esca said.

Berengard’s eyes narrowed. “She is wife to a Roman.”

“She will tell no-one,” Esca said sharply. It was as much a warning to Cottia as a promise to Berengard.

The tall woman eyed Cottia for one more brief second, then turned back to Esca. “You’ve not heard?” Her voice had dropped low.

“Heard…?”

“Lupinus is dead,” Berengard said flatly.

“Ah, that brings me joy to hear,” Esca said, in a low voice thick with the bitterness Cottia had only ever heard by the stream and in the tablinum. “I’ll shed no tears for him. And his bitch of a wife?”

“Oh, she is dead, too,” and Berengard now spoke with as much hatred as Esca had.

“ _Both_ of them?” Esca’s grin made a finger of ice trace Cottia’s spine from the nape down. “Truly, I’d no idea a Roman festival would give me so much cause to celebrate! Tell me, did they die quickly or slowly?”

“There was no way to know, I do not think, but it can be hoped that they burned slowly.” Berengard’s pale-blue eyes glittered.

“ _Burned?_ By the Spear, this tale gets better in the telling!” Berengard’s reply was a laugh that reminded Cottia of the taste of valerian. “Is it known which of their many victims set the fire?”

“ _Nā._ All of us who could be found were put to questioning, of course. I yet have the scars on my back. But I had been told naught but to be gone from the house before a given hour, so I could not give up they who fired the villa.” Her mouth twisted. “Not that I would have.”

“Surely her kin had all the countryside overturned looking for those men?”

“Oh, _gea_ , they did. Two were nailed to crosses, rightly or wrongly. But only two. It takes but one man to fire a house, but it took many more to loot the villa and sell, hide, melt, or butcher what they could.”

“I suppose I should be glad that others had the joy of their wealth,” Esca said. “But I’ll admit a shameful wish that all of it had gone up in flames, wiped out any trace of them.”

“A wish well within my ken,” Berengard said sharply. “But, _gea_ , it is best to think upon all the folk who survived and even thrived thanks to that wealth, folk they’d not even have thought to spit upon. It is better vengeance, in the end, methinks.”

They four stood there in conversation for a while after. Talk shifted to other, easier matters, and Esca and Berengard lost the hard glitter in their eyes and the iron edges in their voices. Mainly he and Ientumaros spoke of horses, their breeding and their selling.

“Will this be your first child, _domina_?” Berengard asked politely.

“My … third, actually,” Cottia said, hoping her hesitation would not be remarked upon. “And yourself, _domina_ , have you any children?”

It was the proper question to ask in response, but she regretted it as she saw the Suevi woman’s face crease with pain.

“I have two daughters,” she said softly. “But they were sold, when both were still little maidens, and I know not where they be or even if they live. I pray to the All-Father every night that they do, and that their lives are not overly hard.”

The eye of Cottia’s mind flashed, as it had not in more than a year, back to herself in old Aquila’s garden, making cutting remarks about slaves within Esca’s hearing. She wondered who had fathered Berengard’s daughters. She wondered whether Berengard had been willing, either time. She wondered if Berengard had tried to give Ientumaros a child but had found herself too old.

“I am so very sorry, _domina_ ,” she said.

 

Esca kept silence as they rode home. It was not the awkward silence that now so often fell between them, but that of one lost in his own thoughts.

“Is all well, Esca?” Cottia finally ventured.

He looked up, startled, as if he had forgotten her presence entirely. _“Sa,”_ he said somewhat absently.

“You seem bereft,” she pressed, “when not an hour ago you seemed overjoyed at that chance encounter.”

He didn’t reply at first. Cottia wondered if she had overstepped. Then, quietly, he said, “I am very glad to have found Berengard again. She is older than I, but not so old that she has not aged before her time. She sheltered the rest of us from Lupinus and his wife as often as she could, often at her own expense. I am glad she is free of them — that the world is free of them — and that she has found happiness. I can think of few more deserving.”

He paused, and then added, “But, _sa,_ the encounter brought back memories, including some that remained buried even when… when I told you the tale last summer. But the oddest thing…” He trailed off.

She waited.

He darted a look at her. A measuring look. When she said nothing, merely returned an expectant gaze, he continued.

“Since he sold me, I had thought that, one day, I would take vengeance upon Lupinus and Luciana. For myself and for the rest, especially that poor wretch he flogged to death. I had no idea how I would do so, in particular how I would not end up on a cross from it. But it was something I swore to myself I would do before I died. I don’t regret that it is no longer necessary. But… there is the strangest emptiness in me, now, and it is a forlorn one.”

Cottia said nothing for a few moments. Then she offered, “Perhaps that will pass, in its own time.”

“Perhaps it will,” he allowed. And then he fell silent again, and they did not speak again until they were stabling the horses at the villa.

_Aprilis_  
 _Anno Quarto_  
 _133 CE_

_“Domina!”_

Cottia had been reclining in the atrium with Cai at her breast, Enica at her side, and Cub at their feet. Now she sat up straight and clutched her two-month-old son closer as Carantinos stumbled in. The torch-bearer of her _processio_ was now in his colt’s years, with limbs that seemed to go every which way and an awkwardness of manner to match. He blushed if a woman not his kin so much as spoke to him.

“What’s wrong, Carantinos?”

In spite of Cottia’s bared breast, the lad’s red face was, for once, not caused by shame. He was gasping so hard he could barely get the words out. “Aëtius has been stricken ill, _domina_. My mother bids you come to the villa.”

“Enica,” she said curtly, rising. “Look after Flavius and Rhiain. Tell the _dominus_ I may not be home tonight.” She didn’t wait for Enica’s _Sa, domina_ before she threw on her mantle and, Cai in her arms, headed for the stable.

She rode as hard as she dared with the babe in one arm, Carantinos following her on his own mount. Procella, who knew the way well, pulled up before Constantia’s villa in good time. A grim-faced stable lad who had been waiting for them took Procella’s reins, and Carantinos followed him with those of his own horse in hand.

Bellicia sat on a couch in the atrium, Constantia’s daughter Aëtia leaning against her. The girl was grey-faced and red-eyed but calm at the moment.

“What happened?” Cottia asked.

“Aëtius was stricken with apoplexy,” Bellicia said. Aëtia gave one dry sob. Bellicia’s arm tightened about her.

Cottia’s heart turned over in her breast. “How bad is he?”

“Bad,” Bellicia said, the short word sharp and almost angry on her lips. “He cannot control the right side of his body, nor can he speak. Constantia is in the great bed-chamber with him and a physician.”

“Where are the other children?”

“The twins are out in the stables with the lads. Constantia thought it best they keep busy, to keep their minds off their father. She ordered the same of Aëtia but the lass needed a shoulder for a bit. Paulla is with one of the serving-girls.”

“What can I do?” Cottia asked.

“Act in her stead for a bit, I’d say. Many of the girls are standing about flustered, gossiping, even one or two weeping. Go about, see what needs to be done, put them to doing it, put your hand to whatever you think meet.”

“Shouldn’t you, or Deieda or Sulia, take charge of them while Constantia is occupied with Aëtius? You are all here much more often than I am.”

Bellicia shook her head. “Deieda is ailing today — drank too much again last night, the fool. Sulia is not much for giving orders, and I do not wish to leave Aëtia’s side. Or Constantia’s, should she emerge and have need of me. Most of the girls know you by sight and reputation; they’ll heed you well enough.”

Cottia had grown accustomed to directing Britivenda and Enica; she found it not much harder to direct a dozen young women and girls. In truth, they seemed relieved that they had not been forgotten. And Constantia was right in that industry helped stave off fearful imaginings. Cottia reaffirmed this for herself as she spent what remained of the afternoon, and all of the evening, lending her hands where they were needed: in the kitchen, with the spinning, helping tend little Paulla.

When the moon had begun to creep across the sky and Constantia had not emerged from the great bed-chamber, Bellicia said, “You may as well return home, Cottia. Deieda should be well tomorrow, and Constantia will, I pray, have had a good night’s sleep.”

The pace of Procella’s return was much more sedate than her ride out, with a well-fed Cai dozing against Cottia’s shoulder and Cottia herself depleted with labour and worry. She stabled Procella for the night, then walked back to the house.

Treading as softly as she could, she entered the nursery. Moonlight silvered the sleeping faces of Flavius and Rhiain, as well as that of Britivenda on her pallet. Cottia gently lowered Cai into his cradle and tucked the little rug up about him. His lids did not so much as stir.

She closed the nursery door behind her, then entered the great bed-chamber. “Marcus?” she whispered, before realising the bed appeared to be empty. She stepped closer, ran her hand over the rug; no form lay beneath it.

She retraced her steps back to the atrium, where she lit a rush-light. Had she missed any slumbering forms on the couches? She had not. Entering the other wing, she called softly: “Enica? Esca? … Marcus?”

There was a faint sound coming from Marcus’s office. As she approached, the sound grew clearer. It was that of liquid being poured.

When she stood in the doorway, her heart turned over painfully in her breast.

He sat at his desk, not looking at her. Not looking at anything, judging from his blank expression. An amphora was at his elbow, no jug of water in sight, and the cup he had just filled was already half-empty. The room reeked wine, and cheap wine at that.

“Cottia,” he said. She remembered coming to him here after her grief over Cartimandua had broken, how flatly he had spoken her name. It was not so much flat, now, as soft and toneless.

“Marcus? What…” She trailed off.

He looked at her. There was pain in his eyes, and remonstration.

“Esca did not come into the house tonight.”

She looked confused. “Perhaps he spent the night in … in the bed of another?”

“Oh, no. He came back to the villa. But not to his bed. I saw him stumble into the barn. I took a lantern in and found him collapsed on the hay, at the back wall. This was maybe two, no more than three hours ago. I have never, ever seen him so drunk in my life.”

“Is he abed now?”

“No, he is still in the barn. I haven’t two good legs to allow him to lean on me all the way back to the house, and I’m not sure I could have roused him in any case.”

He stopped as a spasm of pain crossed his face and he closed his eyes. Not like the sort that knotted his features when his leg pained him. This, she sensed, cut so much deeper.

He continued, “I feared he might have been in a fight, or that perhaps he were not merely drunk but ill. So, taking care with my leg, I bent down as best I could with the lantern to better see his face. And I saw more than his face.”

Finally he opened his eyes again, and they fairly blazed at her.

“Do you know what he clutched in his hand as he slept, Cottia? A hairpin. A hairpin I recognised. And wound about that hairpin were long, bright hairs.”

Everything inside her turned to ice and, at once, cracked. A wild wish flew into her head: that the sturdy limestone walls would give way upon them, that the curved-tile roof would come down upon them.

With a deep, scouring anger building in his voice like mill-stones grinding together, he continued, “And near the floor, not far from his head, protruding from the wall-board, there is a nail. Protruding just enough that several more bright-red hairs had come to be wound about it.”

The edge of his voice had become like a scourge.

“Are all the children mine?”

“ _Domine_ , I—”

His face burst like a thundercloud. He picked up his cup and hurled it at her. She ducked it, and it smashed on the wall behind her. One shard left a long, red scratch along the back of her wrist, and the splash of wine caught the shoulder of her stola.

“Do **_not_** call me your lord now, when you have never done so! Think you I want to hear sweet words from you at this moment? I do not. I want your explanation. I want to know how long this has gone on. I want to know whose children I raise!”

“They _are_ yours, Marcus!” she exclaimed shakily.

“Flavius, obviously,” he snarled, “and Rhiain, I imagine as well. But Cai?”

“Yes, Marcus, Cai is yours, too, even if there is little of you in his colouring or his face. I know you have no reason to trust my words, that I have betrayed you greatly, but I tell you that the first time I lay with Esca, I was one month gone with Cai. It is the truth, and Esca will vouch it.”

“And Cartimandua? Did you give her a Brigantes name for a reason?”

A dagger twisted in her gut. She managed to blurt out, “No. Carti was yours, too.”

He sighed, heavily and with some relief. She wondered if he believed her entirely or if part of his mind chastised himself for, perhaps, clinging to false hope.

And then more long moments in which he stared straight ahead of himself and said nothing.

Finally, he whispered, “ _Why?_ ”

She opened her mouth to speak. She knew she should beg his forgiveness, throw herself on his mercy: He could, legally, kill her for having betrayed him. And Esca as well.

What she heard herself say, softly, was, “I love two men. I love the brave Roman soldier who redeemed the honor of his family. I love the brave British warrior who helped him to do so. I fought the latter love for a long, long time — and Esca, for his part, did the same. In the end, we could not any longer.”

He looked at her again. She was surprised to see, amid the pain and anger and bitterness, a glimmer of … she knew not what.

“It… is different for women, I know. But there is part of me that mocks me for wishing to keep you from what I myself have enjoyed.”

She blinked, confused now.

He looked at her scornfully. “You did not know?”

“What did I not know, Marcus? That you sought pleasure outside our bed, too? I do not relish the hearing of it, even if you have a right to it that I do not, but I will bear it if I must.”

The scornful look was gone, replaced by an almost pitying one.

“No, Cottia. That I also sought it with Esca.”

She blinked again. She had heard the words. Part of her wondered why she felt any shock at all. Once a slave, then the closest of friends, Marcus’s only companion for months on end as they rode and walked and ran and hid — starved gaunt, chattering with cold, mortal terror always with them — before, finally, they fought and barely walked away.

“In the North,” she said softly.

“Not only in the North. Here, too.”

She blinked again. Then she smiled. Then she started to laugh, as if it were the funniest thing in the world. Marcus looked bewildered, but for the life of her she could not stop laughing, though she had no idea why.

“So…so, did he kneel for you, too, Marcus, and tell you that you were yet his _dominus_?”

When she stopped to catch her breath, he said, with a look she could not decipher: “He was not the one who knelt, Cottia.”

She ceased to laugh.

“What— how— No, do not look at me as though I’m simple, I know how it is done between men, and I do not need you to set for me a mosaic of words! But—”

He cut her off. “But how is Marcus Flavius Aquila, a living legend of Rome, the restorer of his family’s honour, an _impudicus_ , a _cineadus_? Is that what you mean to ask, Cottia?”

She could have protested at the top of her lungs that this was not what she meant, but he knew her too well, and she knew how false it would have rung.

“I would not have put it in those terms, Marcus, but… yes. For all that you are British now, you are yet very much the Roman. I do not judge you — the Lady knows, I cannot — but I do wonder at it.”

He was quiet again, regarding the top of the desk. But it was not unbearable to her, now; she sensed he gathered his thoughts.

Presently he said, “I had suffered for men when I was very young, when it was still acceptable for me to do so. In the Army, I took pleasure of a man from time to time. And sometimes of women, but they were not plentiful — except for camp followers, and I would rather fuck the knot in a tree bole, unoiled, than most of them.” He grimaced. “Men, on the other hand, were all about. But, again, I took pleasure of _them_ , not the other way round. There are always some who are eager, if you will, for—” His mouth quirked. “—the centurion’s staff.”

“You needn’t have told me that, Marcus,” Cottia said quietly. “I do not shame you for it, but it is your business, and it needs no justification to me.”

“It is not justification,” he said. “It is prologue.” He blew out his breath and continued.

“When I lay crippled in Calleva, Esca cared for me. ‘Centurion’s Hound’ serves to describe his loyalty, but in truth, it is the man that cares for the dog, not the other way round. Of course, when he was a slave, caring for me was his duty, but after I manumitted him he did so of his own free will, and even as a slave he brought… a devotion to it that one does not always see in slaves, especially those not born to the collar. And he learned to read me, uncannily well. Perhaps it began with watching my face for signs that my leg pained me, but it went well beyond that.”

Cottia said nothing, remembering her own thoughts spoken aloud on a hot summer evening in the tablinum.

“You know how close he and I grew, even before we rode North. I had never felt so comfortable with any other person, yet there was always something there, something under the surface, that we never spoke of. When yet I owned him, I would not have… used him, the way many use slaves. I do not find pleasure in coercion. But once he was freed, I caviled to subject him to suffering, or of course to suffer myself.” He half-smiled, sardonically. “As you said, very much the Roman.

“But the North isn’t Roman territory. I spent months in that wild, wild land with only Esca for company, and I just barely tutored in the language of those we encountered. He and I slept against one another for warmth so many nights, and I relied on him to knead my thigh — with my braccae down around my knees — so I might stand, let alone walk or run. After so long, I ceased to care overly much what Rome thought of… certain things. After a while longer, the fears and the doubts were stripped away, too.

“We were in flight from the Epidaii when it lay in the open between us. We huddled together one night in a sheltered spot, as we usually did, and I was knotted with pain. He kneaded my wounds, and… I responded to his touch. If it was not the first time ever I did, it was the first time I had no defences against it whatsoever. Roman society was a distant dream to the South, and until we found Guern again, Esca was the only one I trusted to speak my mind to. I was always cold, I was always hungry, I was always weary, I was always taut with fear — and I had not been with another, man or woman, since I dove under the wheels of that chariot.”

Marcus coloured. “He saw my need, and I found myself speaking his name, and he came to me. We were filthy and ragged, and we did no more than… than touch one another, that night and other nights thence.

“At Vercovicium, after we had presented the Eagle and had got clean and shorn… I wanted — _we_ wanted — more than that, but he was uneasy of it, in a Roman garrison.” Esca’s words in the tablinum came back to her: _I took no end of beatings and insults in that garrison._

Marcus continued. “We lay in separate cots, and we burned apart. I… eased myself with my hand, and then I fell into sleep. I can only guess he did the same. En route to Calleva, we stopped at a number of _mansiones_. It was autumn, and the _mansionarii_ thought nothing of men sharing a bed for warmth. The first night out from Vercovicium, we had a room to ourselves, and he had brought some bathing-oil, and… “ Marcus fell silent. His face was crimson now. “He took me. And, Cottia, it was as sweet as anything I had ever experienced until the night that you and I wed.”

She said nothing. She did not know what she thought, she did not know what she felt.

“There was no question but that he would come with me, no matter where I went, as lover as well as companion. I was not sure how that would… work,” he said, the half-smile back again, “when I’d a wife, too. But… you were not Roman, to be troubled by Roman mores, and even among British women you are not a common creature. I decided on discretion, and Esca is if nothing else discreet. But I knew you might find out one day, and I decided that matters could simply fall where they would, and we would all proceed from there.

“I did not imagine that matters would grow considerably more complicated than that. I have known for some time that Esca esteems you, both because I love you and because you have become as much a pillar of this place as either of us. I saw nothing else.”

He passed his hand over his face. “I am a fool.”

After moments of leaden silence, she said quietly, “If you are a fool, then I am doubly so, because it took me a long, long time to see my own desire. And then to admit to it.”

He looked at her from behind his palm, then smiled.

“Rather strange in retrospect, isn’t it?”

She felt the corners of her own mouth lift, but she dared not release a bit of the tension in her body.

“What happens now, Marcus? How do we proceed from here?”

He stared at the top of his desk for a moment, again, then looked at her once more.

“With discretion. I have thought about throwing that to the winds, but … we cannot. If it were just the three of us, plus the babes, somewhere in the North with no-one else around for miles, perhaps. But we are woven into the Downs now, among many who love us, some of whom look to us. And then there are the lads and the girls we have here. There may be no evil to wishing for both of you in my bed together, but we cannot expect most others to understand it.”

Her mouth fell open. Her face was hot.

“The three of us…” She trailed off.

He grinned at her, wolfishly. “Don’t tell me that wouldn’t appeal to you, you liar.”

She continued to work her open mouth soundlessly. He sat back in the chair, watching her with immense and obvious self-satisfaction.

“Well. Some retribution, finally, for the wedding _processio_ , eh?”

She laughed, but she was still bright red and she could not look him full in the face.

“Oh, Cottia,” he said softly, his eyes of a sudden bright. “Come to me, _dulcis_.”

She walked across the floor, heart in her throat, wildly wondering for a moment if he might go out to the barn to rouse Esca from his drunken sleep, and bring them both into the great bed-chamber together and lock the three of them in. She wondered if she feared this or wished it.

He pulled her into his lap and kissed her fiercely. She thought of a cloak thrown over a cold marble bench in early spring, a mantle lying on the ground. But when his lips left hers, he simply held her, tightly, and she nestled her face into the crook of his neck.

After a long while, she startled at his whisper.

“I do not know everything women know. Are there ways to… have a care, whose child you conceive… or birth?”

She hesitated.

“There are. None of them are absolutely certain, and some are perilous.”

His arms tightened around her.

“I would not lose you, nor my children their mother. Take what cares you can, that will not harm you. And, for all that, if you do bear a child whose eyes are grey or whose hair is the colour of chestnuts, we will call him or her our own, you and me. We will say that you and Esca have an ancestor in common, one both Brigantes and Iceni. And we will stare down anyone who dares contradict us.”

_Maius_  
 _Anno Quarto_  
 _133 CE_

They rode out on a warm day. Cottia sat pillion behind Marcus on Cornix; Procella carried Esca and a travel-bag.

She wished for a third horse. On her own mount, her knees deep in its sides, the reins wound about her fists, wind lifting her hair, she could have let the illusion of flying distract her from how her belly shifted and clutched with nervousness. As it was, with the solidity of Marcus in front of her, she had to be content with digging her fingers into his shoulders. He hissed in pain from time to time, but he understood, and he did not object.

Cornix followed Procella. Esca had passed through the hilly lands to the north of their own many times. He had told Marcus he knew of a place where no-one else would happen upon them.

Gaining that place required the horses to climb a substantial hill of middling steepness. Small hills had never vexed them, but they were creatures of the Downs, and they made this ascent with ill grace. The hill, caped in pines and dotted with stones, was not especially fertile land. Yet, less than mid-way up, it flattened somewhat and spread into what was less a meadow than a very shallow and not very wide bowl of field-grasses.

Esca had stopped Procella on the edge of it. He turned head and shoulders backward to smile at Marcus and Cottia. Marcus grinned. Cottia gamely pulled up the corners of her mouth.

Marcus dismounted and held out his hand for Cottia. She needed no help in unhorsing herself, but she was glad for his hand now, and her fingers pressed into it hard as she stepped down from Cornix.

Esca had already leapt down from Procella, and now his hands were in the travel-bag. When they emerged from it, a heavy pile of linen lay over his right arm, and a small pouch hung from his wrist. He nodded to Marcus, who moved to his side and began helping him unfold the linen sheet, then lay it over the grass. They removed their boots and laid them to the side of the blanket, and Esca did the same with the pouch.

Then they looked at Cottia expectantly. The hair on her nape rose a bit, which didn’t surprise her. What did surprise her was the heavy warm pang that counterpointed the prickling of her neck.

She came to them.

She had just placed her boots next to theirs when Marcus took her right hand, Esca her left. All the breath left her. How much of it was fear, she couldn’t say, but not all of it was desire.

Something shifted in Esca’s eyes. He did not release her hand, but he loosened his grip and sat back on his heels.

“Do you wish to do this, Cottia?”

Marcus looked at Esca, faintly surprised. Cottia could have laughed at that, but it would not have been a deeply mirthful laugh.

“I do. And yet…” she trailed off, and her head turned in the direction whence they had come. “I… I don’t know. Both of you… it is a little overwhelming.” Now she did laugh, faintly.

There was a moment’s silence, broken only by their own breaths, the soft nickering of the horses, a solitary cry from a hawk. Then there was the shifting of a body against the linen, and another rustling sound.

“Cottia?” Esca asked. She turned her head back to see a second piece of linen in his hand, long and narrow, fetched out of the pouch. “What if you cannot see us?”

She bit her lip and contemplated the blind-fold.

“I… perhaps?” She could not remember the last time she had sounded so tenuous. Esca said nothing, nor did Marcus. She realised they were waiting for her to say yea or nay. She swallowed and nodded, and she lifted her head.

Esca shifted toward her on the blanket, his hands rising. She watched the grey eyes on her face until the strip of linen swallowed them up, and Marcus too, and the meadow, and the daylight. Then the knot lay snug against her left temple.

There was a moment’s quiet. Then Marcus said, “Stand up,” his voice little more than a breath and the small words full of hitches.

She obeyed. The weave of the linen was coarse under her bare feet.

“Lift your arms.”

She thrust them up, above her head. She felt the skirt of her stola being gathered in hands, then the entire garment lifting. She remembered Esca’s chamber… a year ago, had it been? There was the soft thump of the bundled stola hitting the ground, and then Marcus was gripping her undertunic and working it over her head as well. The mild air rested forgivingly against her skin as the undertunic landed in the grass.

She heard breaths quickening. Two breaths? … Three?

“Lie down, _dulcis_. On your back.”

She dropped to her knees again, then swung her bottom down onto the linen. She stretched her legs out before her without effort. Lowering herself on her arms behind her proved a little more difficult, as they were trembling. But shortly she was supine, heart tapping at her ribs.

When one pair of lips touched her neck and another her belly, the shock of pleasure knocked the fear straight out of her. She loosed a startled cry and felt her shoulders arch of their own will. Their hands, the one that cupped her breast and chafed the nipple, the other that smoothed her inner thighs and seemed to be easing them apart, were of a piece: strong, work-rough. She knew that Esca’s were somewhat larger than Marcus’s; she knew that each of them had his own scent under those of salt and oil and sweat. Her mind seemed to not wish to distinguish them, rather to merge them into one lover with two mouths and four hands.

The higher pair of hands were holding her breasts now, stroking and squeezing, and the mouth that went with those hands was ministering to one nipple and then the other, sucking, licking the tips, biting gently. Lower down, a hand was still caressing her inner thighs, but now also a finger had insinuated itself into her cunt, moving in and out more and more easily as she began to flood. Then her _landica_ was being held between lips, and she groaned as a tongue slid back and forth over the tiny berry of flesh.

Even when another finger entered her, and both fingers curled upward and stroked her in a way that made her thighs shake under the steady caress and the wetness flow out of her like a river, she did not think about who was between her legs, who was at her breasts. She let worded thought go, like releasing a scrap of silk into a strong wind, and she let her body undulate between one source of pleasure and another.

With each arch up or down, each pitch to either side, tension built in her like a drawn bow. She knew they felt it, because one hand was now gripping her shoulder, leaving its mate at her breasts, while the entire other pair of hands was digging into her buttocks and anchoring her down as much as it was spreading her wide. The mouths had not left their places on her, but they worked at her with more urgency, teeth now inflicting pleasure with a stinging edge to it on swollen, sensitive flesh.

She screamed when she spent, pushing hips and breasts upward simultaneously into devouring mouths, then grinding her buttocks down against clawing hands. They continued to probe and lap and suck and bite at her until she stopped shaking; then they were gone, and she lay limp, the sheet under her parted thighs damp.

As she came to herself, she heard two quickened breaths again. One of them seemed to move closer to her, and then Esca’s hoarse voice was in her ear.

“Marcus has told you what he is to me, and I to him. Would you like to see for yourself, _domina_?”

She sat up and tugged at the blind-fold. When she removed it, she saw two faces — flushed, lips parted, eyes dark — staring at her. Both men were still full-clad.

“I would,” she said, over a dry tongue and dry lips.

She drew her knees up and encircled them with her arms, watching in fascination as Esca grasped the hem of Marcus’s tunic. His eyes were as reverent as they had been with her, a year before, as he drew it over Marcus’s head, his hands equally so on the flat plain of Marcus’s chest. Marcus’s own eyes glowed like coals as he pulled up Esca’s tunic in turn. She watched them caress one another, press their bare torsos together and join their mouths. They were so beautiful, light freckled skin over sturdy frame, satiny olive skin over spare frame, muscles curving and contracting beneath both, the blue whorls on Esca’s arm rising into sinuous life. Their beauty went through her, like lightning deep into the ground. She realised, too, that the taste of her had been on Esca’s lips, and now they shared it between them.

Esca was gently holding Marcus’s face in both hands as he kissed him, while Marcus’s hands were gripping Esca’s shoulders. Cottia found herself reaching out, left hand and right hand. The fingers of the right glided through Marcus’s thick hair, those of the right slid indolently over Esca’s shoulder-blades. Eyes closed, they had not expected her touch, which wrung small noises of desire from each that were muffled against the other’s mouth.

They broke off their kiss in a fury of gasping. Open-mouthed and wide-eyed, Marcus dropped back to his heels, leaning more heavily on his good leg; then, as Cottia had, he brought both legs out before him. Esca hooked slightly trembling hands into the top of Marcus’s braccae and pulled, and Marcus raised his hips in acquiescence. Cottia licked her lips as he arched upward, then again as his cock sprang into view, swollen and crimson. She gripped her hands together to keep from reaching out for it. Each of them belonged to the others, but, just for this moment, Marcus belonged entirely to Esca.

Once Marcus was relieved of his braccae, Esca surprised her by turning away. Then she saw him reach for the pouch again. From it he pulled a small vial. A moment of confusion for Cottia gave way to realisation, then a slow-burning excitement.

Naked, lips parted, undeniably in need, Marcus stared up at Esca for a brief moment. Esca said nothing, but his expression was one of command. Marcus turned, and then he was belly-down on the linen, buttocks exposed.

Esca knelt at his side. Then he looked up at Cottia.

“Uncork this for me, and pour some of the oil into my right palm,” he said softly. “I will tell you when to stop.”

She rose up on her knees again, took the vial from him, and decanted it slowly, watching the cup of his hand fill. It was nearly overflowing when he whispered, “Enough,” and she replaced the cork and set the vial down on the linen.

Esca’s full hand hovered just over Marcus’s arse and opened slightly, so that the oil trickled down into the cleft. Marcus hissed at the sudden coolness against intimate flesh, but Esca began to smooth it into the cleft with gentle fingertips, and the sounds issuing from Marcus changed to appreciative murmurs. The calamus scent of the oil grew stronger as it warmed between their skins. Marcus began to push his hips upward again.

Cottia watched, hypnotised, as Esca slid a forefinger into Marcus, slowly and smoothly. Marcus uttered a groan against the linen and thrust backward and upward. Esca’s finger re-emerged from between Marcus’s buttocks, then plunged into him again, the motion fluid and inexorable. He seemed to press in more deeply this time, and Marcus threw his head back and groaned once more.

A second finger glided into Marcus, and Cottia saw the heel of Esca’s hand flex slightly. Marcus loosed a long, tremulous cry of need that pierced Cottia’s belly like a needle of fire. Esca slid his fingers out of Marcus and back in, over, and over, and over, sometimes breaking the rhythm to work them more deeply into Marcus’s body and find that spot inside him that seemed to undo Marcus utterly. Marcus began to whipsaw his body back and forth between Esca’s hand and the ground. Cottia realised he was not only fucking himself on Esca’s hand but rubbing his fiercely engorged cock against the sheet, its roughness be damned.

Esca, breathing hard now, got to his feet and pushed down his braccae. His own cock was dark and nearly flat against his belly. He stepped out of the braccae and knelt once again; his hands were on Marcus’s hips when Cottia spoke his name, and he looked up at her. She recognised the wild look in his eyes quite well.

“Can you… with Marcus on his left side?” she asked huskily.

Esca blinked for a moment, then said, “Marcus?”

Marcus looked up at Cottia, and at first she wasn’t sure he saw her at all. Then he was turning again, left side now against the sheet, right leg stretched out unsupported and quivering. He looked at Cottia as if he would ask her a question.

Vial in hand, she moved to lie fully alongside him, her left side turned upward. She let the vial rest beside her, and then she put a gentle hand beneath his right thigh, lifting it to let it rest atop her left hip, the calf and foot hanging in the air behind her. His expression was one of relief, excitement, and a hint of nerves. She smiled and wound an arm about his upturned shoulder and brushed her lips against his. Then she raised her head and looked over his.

“Esca?”

Esca had already lain down behind Marcus. His hands were now in motion but out of Cottia’s sight. If she could not see him take his cock in hand, then begin to work it into Marcus, she could feel his entrance into Marcus pushing her husband against her, and she could hear and feel Marcus gasp with the pleasure of being breached.

An arm about Marcus’s waist for purchase, Esca began to thrust into him, slowly and gently at first. Marcus’s hips moved with his, the rhythm flawless, almost silken, a dance. When Esca began to take him harder, more fiercely, Marcus threw as much of his body backward against Esca as he could, meeting abandon with abandon. Cottia watched their faces, flushed and heavy-lidded, as they came together, moved apart, came together again, moaning things that might have been Latin or British or no words at all. Once Esca uttered something that Marcus seemed not to understand but that made Cottia’s face burn; she was glad Esca’s eyes were then closed.

She poured a little, a very little, of the oil into her left palm. Then she waited, watched, recognised the tell-tale catches of breath and tremours of muscles that cannot hold their tension for much longer. She slid her lips against Marcus’s again and plunged her tongue into his mouth, his tongue eagerly meeting it. Her hand disappeared between their bodies to encircle his cock.

“Oh, _yes_ ,” Marcus gasped against her mouth. She barely needed to move her hand on him at all; as Esca’s thrusts pushed him forward, his rigid length slid back and forth in the tight, slick circle of her palm and fingers.

And then he was spilling over her hand, onto the linen, trembling as if in fever. His cock, still hard, continued to push against her palm, fast and hard, half a dozen times. Then a sharp, wrenching cry rose behind him, and he surged forward against Cottia’s palm a final time, before Esca sank down onto the linen.

None of them moved for a long time. Marcus’s eyes remained closed, as did Esca’s. One of the horses nickered again. A soft breeze stirred the pines below them.

She realised, at some point, that she had espied movement out of the corner of one eye. She paid it little mind, outside of an idle curiosity; it was too small to be a man or woman or even a toddling child.

And then she saw the brown fur above the grass, the sun high in the sky tinting it red.

She could not name what washed over her, through her, just then, something stronger and more powerful even than spending in the hands and mouths of her loved ones, or feeling Marcus spend in her own. She smiled, a faint smile of welcome, as the hare hopped toward her. Her cheek still lay against the linen, and her eyes were level with those of the small creature.

Its own eyes were bright blue.

It regarded her solemnly for a moment, without the fear one usually sees in hares, its nose twitching. She would have sworn she saw one long ear dip slightly in her direction. Then it turned about, and it was, almost in a instant, gone.

_December_  
 _Anno Quarto_  
 _133 CE_

Cottia’s heart pounded louder than Procella’s hooves on the hard, frozen ground. Though it was a month too early and no-one had asked her to be at the villa, she cursed herself. Curse after curse she loosed, in time with the mare’s hoof-beats.

Carantinos had, for a second time that year, torn into the atrium, red-faced and gasping. Cottia knew, even before his words were out, the ill tidings he had brought. Cai, old enough now to hold a cup of milk in his chubby little hands, she left with Britivenda and his sibs.

_Lady, Lady, please let me not be too late._

She slid off Procella and shoved the reins into the hands of a white-faced stable-lad. Then she all but ran into the great villa, paying no heed to the ice-patches all about, her mantle swirling about her ankles.

Once more, Bellicia sat on a couch with her arm about Aëtia, but this time the girl’s entire body shook with sobs, and she hid her face in Bellicia’s shoulder. Bellicia was quiet, but her eyes were swollen and her face red, and her stola was covered in blood and mucus. Sulia sat on another couch, white-faced and staring at nothing; her stola was likewise befouled.

Deieda stood stone-faced against a wall, her clothing just as soiled. Never, even when she had drunk too much the night before, had Cottia ever seen her face so grey.

Her prayer to the Lady had been in vain.

“Come with me,” Deieda said, her voice flat, weary, as she turned on her heel. Cottia, not sure how she could move with her insides turning to lead, followed her.

The great bed-chamber was foetid, the odours bringing wrenching memories as well as fresh grief. In the centre of the bed lay its unmoving mistress. Her hair was matted with sweat. Blood and foul effluvia caked her pubis and thighs. Her flesh that was turned upward was a pallid yellow, while that which lay against the bed had begun to purple with settling blood. For a mercy, either Deieda or Bellicia had closed her eyes for her.

Cottia stood for a long moment, feeling her insides turn to ice.

Then she sat on the edge of the bed and took Constantia’s hand in her own. It was cold, as she knew it would be, feeling like wax against her fingers, no pulse beneath the skin.

She wished they two had had a god in common to whom she could pray for the passage of Constantia’s soul. She wished she had been at the villa already, though she had not attended many births and, quite likely, could not have made the slightest bit of difference.

“ _Vale, amica,_ ” Cottia whispered, before laying the pale limp hand back down against the bed.

She had almost forgotten Deieda’s presence, until she heard the tired, flat voice say, “The _medicus_ is certain now that Aëtius will likely never recover. Before she died, Constantia said she wished for you and Marcus to care for the babe.”

Cottia looked up sharply. “The babe lives?”

“He does. I left him with a wet-nurse.”

“Bring him to me,” Cottia said. Her voice wobbled on the last word.

“There is someone else you must see first,” Deieda said. “Come.”

Cottia followed her from the great bed-chamber, down to the end of the wing, into a much smaller chamber not much use for anything but storage. But it was empty, and in it stood a serving-girl who looked no older than nine or ten years. Her eyes were wide, the skin over her cheeks pale and tight with fear and, Cottia thought, guilt.

“Minovena,” Deieda said in acknowledgment, closing the door behind herself and Cottia.

“Deieda, _domina_ ,” the girl said, dipping her head.

“Do you tell _Domina_ Cottia what you saw,” Deieda ordered.

Minovena gulped air, her thin shoulders heaving.

“I was scrubbin’ the floor-tiles in the southwest wing when I heard voices coming out of a chamber. I recognised _Domina_ Constantia’s voice, not the other lady’s. They was arguin’. I moved further down and away to scrub another part of the floor. I didn’t hear no more voices. Then I heard something go thud.”

She paused, darting eyes settling briefly on Cottia’s face, before continuing: “Then in a little bit I saw _Domina_ Angharad leave the chamber and shut the door behind her.”

Something seemed to pull the air violently out of Cottia’s lungs, and the ice that had set inside her began to boil. For a moment she didn’t see Minovena, or Deieda, or the chamber about them all.

“And what did you do after that?” Deieda was asking the girl.

“I didn’t do nothin’, not at first. I didn’t think nothin’ was wrong, not till I heard what sounded like a groan a while later, though it weren’t loud. I went to that chamber, and I opened the door, and I saw the _domina_ layin’ on the floor clutchin’ her belly, and blood on her stola over her thighs. And then I ran and got you and Bellicia and Sulia.” Minovena gulped again, and her eyes glistened. “Deieda, I’m so sorry. _Domina_ Cottia, I’m so sorry.”

“You did nothing wrong, lass,” Deieda said, genuine reassurance in her voice. “You couldn’t have known.”

“Deieda’s right,” Cottia said, coming to herself for a moment. “And you did the right thing when you realised something was wrong.”

The girl hugged her arms about herself and lowered her head with a loud sniffle. Cottia wanted to put her own arms about her, but then Deieda said, “Thank you, Minovena. You can go now. Do you find something useful to do, it’ll put your mind at ease. What’s done is done, and what happens next is no burden for your little shoulders.”

After the door had closed behind the Minovena and her foot-falls had faded away down the wing, Cottia said, as simply as if she were observing a change in the weather, “I will kill her.”

“You will do _no such thing,_ ” Deieda said, her voice coming up from the bottom of her lungs, loud and deep.

“By the Lady, I will,” Cottia snarled, moving for the door.

Deieda seized her by the shoulders and slammed her against the wall. A wave of pain and dizziness broke over her as her head struck the plaster. When it had cleared, she bared her teeth at Deieda. _“Let go of me!”_

“Cottia _._ Are you _stupid,_ wench? She’s the wife of a _procurator Augusti_! We’ve no proof other than the words of a ten-year-old girl! And for all we know, she was mistaken!”

“I doubt she was,” Cottia rasped.

Deieda shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. We’ve no proof, no power, nothing.”

“Then why did you tell me at all?” Cottia heard her own voice catch in her throat.

Deieda’s eyes were implacable. “Stand there and tell me you wouldn’t have wanted to know. That, if you’d heard it later, you’d have tried to thrash me for not telling you.”

Cottia slumped under Deieda’s grip, defeated. Deieda released her and moved away. They stood there for a long moment, the silence about them as tense as a bow with an arrow nocked to it.

“The child,” Cottia finally said.

“In the northeast wing. Follow me again.”

As they approached the great bed-chamber again, they heard Constantia’s name being called out, over and over, in voices raw with grief. The open door showed Bellicia and another woman, sturdier than Sulia, lowering Constantia’s body to the floor; for just as one was laid on the ground when one was born, one was laid on the ground when one had died. The two of them, and Sulia standing beyond them, made the _conclamatio_. The echoes followed them almost into the atrium, then died out as eerily as they had rung out.

The chamber they entered in the northeast wing was Paulla’s nursery. Paulla, now four years old, was not there. A young woman was, one whom Cottia recognised as having had a child herself a few months before. The infant at her full breast, however, was but a newborn.

“Hand _Domina_ Cottia the boy,” Deieda said. The wet-nurse, blinking in surprise, stood up from her chair and pulled the infant away from her breast; he cried in dismay.

Cottia took him into her arms. Her own breasts ached, but her milk had been dwindling away since Cai’s first sip from a cup. With a gentle finger she stroked his little olive-skinned face and his mop of dark hair, very much like Constantia’s.

The eyes he opened on her, wide-set in his face, were grey.

They had not been open for more than a few heartbeats when she heard the thumps of boots, quite a few boots, coming from the direction of the atrium.

The wet-nurse’s eyes widened. Deieda’s did too, at first, but then narrowed almost immediately afterward, and she turned on her heel without a word. Cottia, the hair on the nape of her neck rising, followed her.

Bellicia’s voice, rising with outrage, met them before they had set foot into the atrium. “What mean you by this? She is not even cold!”

“Indeed, _domina_. It would be best, would it not, to secure the rights of her and her husband’s children straight away?”

The man’s voice was cool, firm, precise. It tickled the edge of Cottia’s memory, but she could not quite place it. Nor could she quite see the speaker as she and Deieda gained the entrance to the atrium, for between them and him stood sixteen legionaries, each holding a tablet and stylus.

“‘Secure their rights’? With two _contubernia_ at your back? Secure them from whom, _Lucane_?”

Lucanus.

Cottia reached out to the wall where the northeast wing began and braced her palm against it, nails scraping against the plaster. Deieda looked at her, seemed to consider touching her on the shoulder, evidently decided against it.

“Any number of claimants to their property,” the procurator said. “With their mother dead and their father unlikely to recover, such claimants will doubtless emerge.”

“One seems to have emerged already,” Cottia said. She spoke calmly, but at the sound of her voice the head of every legionary turned toward the mouth of the wing.

As one, the men flatly assessed whatever threats the two women might pose. A few who stood further away from the wing lost interest and returned their attention toward Lucanus and Bellicia. Those closer to the wing continued to eye Cottia and Deieda warily.

Then the mass of them parted for Lucanus. He wore the formal robes of his office. His face was as hard and unreadable as a death-mask.

“I would guard my tongue if I were you, _domina_ ,” he said. “Defamation is a serious matter.”

“Have I named such a claimant?” Cottia asked mildly, holding his gaze, her anger cold now that Deieda had shaken the blind rage out of her. “I do not believe I have. In any event I am as curious as Bellicia to know why you require two _contubernia_ to enter a villa of women, children, servants, and one crippled _paterfamilias._ ”

Lucanus’s expression did not change. “I take utmost care in everything I do, _domina_ , and I intend to bring it to this matter as well.” He turned abruptly from her and spoke to the two _decani_ : “Your men may commence the inventory.”

“Inventory?” Cottia exclaimed as boots echoed once again through the atrium and into the wings, passing close by her and Deieda.

“Yes, _domina_ ,” Lucanus said, turning back to her and this time favoring her with a tight smile. “With their mother dead and their father still gravely incapacitated, I intend to make sure the entire inheritances of the children under my legal guardianship is fully accounted for.”

She said nothing, just stared at his retreating back as he followed one _contubernium_ into the opposite wing.

“Cottia,” Bellicia whispered, red-rimmed eyes wide in her whitened face. She approached Cottia with her hand held out before her, and Cottia took it in both of hers.

With a deep breath, Cottia said quietly, “Do you take the girls to your and Gavo’s house. Where are the twins?”

“In the stables,” Bellicia said, her voice quavering.

“Bring them with you, and the babe and his wet-nurse as well. I will come for them later.”

“Think you Lucanus means them harm?” Deieda hissed.

“I…” Cottia rubbed at her eyes. “I don’t know. I should think him not so foolish. Or… her. But they should not be here, at least, while his men paw through everything. Do you go with Bellicia and the children too, Deieda.”

“Mean you to stay here?” Deieda asked.

“ _Na,_ I see nothing to be gained in it. I must speak to Marcus — and not only Marcus.”

 

She found him where he had once found her.

This time of year the reeds glistened with frost. His cloak was long enough to tuck beneath him, and he had, but she wondered whether he would have felt the cold had he not. His knees were drawn up, his head in his arms.

She didn’t call to him as she approached; his head came up at her foot-falls anyway, loud against the crisp reeds. She slipped to her knees beside him and leant into him, putting an arm tentatively around him. Both of his lashed around her so tightly as to drive the breath out of her.

“Oh, Cottia.” His voice was thick, choked, and his breaths ragged.

She said nothing, simply held him. She envied him his tears, and she hated herself for that envy.

“This… this is my doing,” he finally said.

The shock was like being struck with ice-cold iron. “What?”

He drew back from her, regarded her with red and glassy eyes. “You know, don’t you?”

“That the child is yours? _Sa_ , I know. I was there when his eyes opened.” He gave a slight start, and she realised he had not seen the babe yet. “That her death, or Aëtius’s, is on you doesn’t follow — and don’t blaspheme,” she said, low and fierce, “by saying otherwise. Such is up to the gods.”

“She, and he, would be alive if we hadn’t…” He trailed off.

“ _If_.” She spat the word. “If Marcus had not nearly lost his leg in Isca Dumnoniorum, I’d be slowly withering in some _respectable_ house in Calleva, and you’d be nothing but bones in an unmarked grave outside the amphitheatre. What use is it tormenting yourself like this, Esca? It won’t bring her back.”

He made no reply. His swollen eyes settled on the stream, as they had so long ago, watching birds wade and insects flit.

Finally he said, “You’ve figured as much from the time, I’m sure, but it was the night of Aëtius’s apoplexy. I was there in the afternoon, helping two of the stable lads with a lame horse. One of the girls, I can’t remember which, came running from the house, ill-dressed for the cold, and screaming. We followed her into the great bed-chamber and found Constantia struggling to lift Aëtius from the floor. Half his face was slack, the other half terrified, all of it stark white. She couldn’t lift him, of course, but had we not arrived she would have kept trying until it—” He broke off. “Until it killed her.”

Cottia’s heart hitched, but she said nothing and waited for him to continue.

“The lads and I carried him to his bed, and a _medicus_ was called. He bled and purged Aëtius — to no avail, of course,” he said scathingly. “An uncle of my mother’s suffered an apoplexy when I was little. There is nothing one can do except make the stricken one comfortable, wait for the gods to heal him, and then have him rebuild his strength. But I suppose the purges and bleeding made the _medicus_ feel better, and that’s the important thing, eh?” His voice cracked at the end — she knew he thought of Marcus’s first surgeon — and drew a hand over his face.

“Constantia,” Cottia said quietly.

He took a deep breath.

“When all was done, it was well after dark. The girls and the lads had gone to their own pallets, the _medicus_ to his home. She came up to me and touched my arm and said, ‘I will not sleep tonight, and I cannot bear to be alone. Come you into the _peristylum_ and sit with me awhile.’

“And I did. We sat side by side on a couch there, and she poured wine for me, and she talked of Aëtius with a faraway look in her eye and a faraway tone to her voice. Of how he had courted her, how he saw not just the young girl she was but the woman she would become, how it was more than flattery and more than flattering. How much he trusted her, how much he respected her, things she never thought to hope for in a husband. I said little, mostly listened. She spoke and walked and poured as she always does — did — but it dawned on me after a while that she confided in me so not simply because she was afraid and sleepless, though she was, or because I was there, though I was… but because she had drunk far too much unwatered wine.

“She eventually leant on my shoulder and wept. It hurt, Cottia, it hurt greatly to see such a stalwart soul in pain. I held her and tried to comfort her, and she lifted her head, and … her eyes. She had lovely eyes, did Constantia. And a look to them that said — stated, not asked — ‘You will deny me nothing.’”

He looked at Cottia then, without flinching, and said, “And I didn’t. We … lay down on that same couch. There was no tenderness to it; she would not have it. She was all anger and despair. When we finished, as soon as she came back to herself, she looked stricken. She sat on the edge of the couch and held her face in her hands and would not let me touch her again, and she softly bid me leave.”

He stopped again, then added: “From there, I went to the _taberna_ , and I stayed until I had only just enough of my senses left to let me walk home.”

Cottia thought of Marcus leaning over Esca in the hay, what he found in Esca’s hand. She pushed the thought away, and gently drew the back of her hand down Esca’s damp cheek.

“Oh, _annwyl_. You are not the one who killed her.”

His eyes opened, wide, and his head rose sharply. Cottia froze and, inwardly, cursed her own stupidity.

“So,” he said slowly, after a moment, “after such an impassioned speech about the gods and their all-powerful hands, there is another on whom you place blame?”

Her eyes flickered to the ground. Another mistake.

“I think not, _domina_. I think there is something you keep from me here.”

She didn’t dare lift her eyes from the ground now. They were lifted for her, with hard fingers on her jaw wrenching her head up. The look in his eyes was as fierce as when he had first knelt for her in his chamber, but not tender at all.

“Let go of me!” she shouted, of a sudden afraid.

_“Tell me!”_

His shout echoed all about them in the silence, no bird-song now to soften it.

She told him, all in what seemed a single rush of breath.

His hand dropped from her, and she watched all the color leach out his face, the faint scattering of freckles standing out against the pallor. His breathing began to come ragged again, but he shed no more tears. His teeth were clenched, and his eyes … _oh,_ his eyes. Pray the Lady Andred he never, ever looked at her that way.

“Who else knows?” His voice was harsh and grave-dry.

“Six of us. The little maid who saw it. Myself, Bellicia, Sulia, Deieda, Enica. I was the last to be told.”

“And you have all done nothing with this knowledge?” His voice rose in incredulity. She tried to remember that his rage was fresh and like fire, while hers had set in ice.

“The only witness was the young girl. Her word against that of the wife of this province’s _procurator Augusti_. Who could claim she knew nothing when she walked out of the chamber. Or that the girl was mistaken and that she was not there at all. As for the rest of us? Our word would be regarded as nothing but women’s jealous squabbling,” she said bitterly.

“So there will be no justice,” he said, his voice breaking again on the last word.

“In this world? No. There will be no justice. Not within the law, British or Roman.”

They fell silent for a long moment. Then he repeated, “‘Not within the law.’”

She laughed bitterly. “Oh, I’ve thought of that. Deieda had to throw me against a wall and talk me out of seeking out Angharad with a dagger in my hand.”

“ _Na, na_ ,” he said, shaking his head. “Deieda was right to do so. I was thinking… I suppose I should know better, but there must be some way, mustn’t there? You are the wife of Marcus Flavius Aquila. His uncle has influential friends.”

“What do you hope could be accomplished?” Cottia asked.

He sighed. “I don’t know. The soiling of a pair of reputations, at the very least. But perhaps something more.”

 

There would have been more space at the great villa. But with Constantia lying in its atrium, her feet pointed at the door, it would have been unseemly. And there would have been gossip.

Britivenda was tasked with minding the children and Cub. Enica made to join her, but Cottia laid a hand on her shoulder. “You are party to this, Enica. And I think you are old enough and sharp enough to sit with us anyway.” Enica flushed, but she no longer gaped like a fish as she would have a few years ago, and she followed Cottia from the hallway into the atrium.

There sat Marcus and Esca, Bellicia and Gavo, Deieda and Sulia, Uncle Aquila, Claudius Hieronimianus, who happened to be visiting his old friend for the Saturnalia, and a well-dressed young man Cottia did not recognise. Slight of build, he seemed Egyptian by the look of him, and of an age with Marcus and Esca. He also seemed not entirely comfortable.

“Julianus,” Hieronimianus said. “This is young Aquila’s wife Cottia and her maidservant Enica. Cottia, this is Lucius Octavius Cornelius Publius Salvius Julianus Aemilianus, who will someday make a very impressive jurist. He thought it might be interesting to travel to Britannia with me for the festival. I did not anticipate that his counsel might be needed.”

Julianus smiled thinly. Cottia suspected he would rather not have been sitting with Britons, or with women of any nation.

“ _Domine,_ ” she said, inclining her head, not quite sure how such a man would be addressed. “Might I have Enica fetch you a cup of wine? We are not awash in Falernian, alas, but neither do we lack for good vintages here.”

“It is considerate of you, _domina_ , but I will decline,” Julianus said briskly. “I believe I have the full story from … Deieda, is it? Have you or your maidservant anything more to add?”

Cottia shook her head as she sank down onto a couch beside Marcus. “No, _domine_ , I do not think so.”

“So,” he said, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees and temple his fingers. “The children’s mother is dead. The prognosis for the recovery of their father is, at best, uncertain. But, while he lives, they cannot own any property, nor can they inherit from their mother’s will. And the _procurator Augusti_ Lucanus, nearly immediately after her death, appointed himself their _tutor_. He is legally positioned to seize the villa in question under the guise of administering the estate for them.”

“Still, they will inherit when they come of age, correct?” Marcus asked.

“That is correct. However, an estate guardian acting in bad faith can wreak a great deal of fiscal mischief on an estate in a decade. There may not _be_ much to inherit by then.” Eyes narrowed, and the corners of mouths turned downwards.

“What do you suggest, _domine_?” Uncle Aquila asked.

“I suggest that another _tutor_ be found for the children. As I understand it, their father had no close kinsmen left alive? Therefore, I would say, the duty is best shouldered by one of the Roman men in this chamber — and that he appeal to the emperor, not the governor, to bestow said duty upon him.”

Cottia and Deieda turned to look at one another at the same time. When Cottia swung her head back away, Marcus’s steady gaze was waiting for her. “ _Domine_ ,” he said, though he still looked at Cottia. “It is my understanding that Constantia wished for my wife and me to take in the newborn child.”

Cottia flicked her eyes past him to Esca, whose face gave nothing away at all. Old training, put to new purpose. Her heart lurched, and she returned her gaze to Marcus’s face.

“And if it prove needful,” Marcus continued, “we will foster all five children at our villa.”

“I should not think it needful,” Julianus said. “As _tutor_ , you could have some fostered with other families.”

“Gavo and I would take in Aëtia and Paulla,” Bellicia said. “I would not have them separated one from the other.”

“And the twins?” Cottia asked.

The deep voice that replied surprised her. “I see no reason I cannot host them.”

Marcus’s eyebrows lifted. “Are you sure, Uncle?”

Old Aquila’s own brows, thick and white, drew together. “Very sure. It would certainly be no financial burden: If you were made _tutor_ , you would draw on their estate for their upkeeping.”

Then, unexpectedly, he smiled. “It’s been a while since I sheltered a young Roman under my roof, and I miss the company. You and I must find them a suitable instructor in swordsmanship. But I will enjoy teaching them _latrunculi_ , Sasstica will enjoy having more at the table to cook for, and Stephanos will enjoy having something new to grumble about.”

“As you wish, Uncle,” Marcus said, his face softened slightly.

“And you, _domine_ ,” Julianus addressed Marcus, “will take in the babe?”

“We will,” Cottia replied. Julianus ignored her. Marcus, reaching out to cover his hand with hers over her thigh, added smoothly, “As _domina mea_ says, we will take in the babe.”

Julianus flushed slightly and narrowed his eyes. “Then the matter of fosterage is settled. I shall appeal to the Emperor on behalf of you and the children when I return to Rome.”

“He is no longer in Judaea?” Marcus asked.

“No, _domine_ , that campaign has concluded. Hadrian Augustus has returned home. He is not the youngest of men anymore, nor the healthiest. But his mind remains sharp, as does his passion for law. And while he is loath to interfere where it is not needful, he would certainly take keen interest in any case of Roman heirs being deprived of their rightful legacies.”

The young jurist smiled of a sudden, and if it were not the warmest of smiles it was far more genuine than any he had displayed through the course of the afternoon. “Do you know what has been said of our Emperor’s decisions in law? ‘Justice paired with human kindness.’ I would place my trust in him entirely that he will see to the protection of these children and their inheritance.”

“I pray you are right, _domine_ ,” Cottia said.

 

The procession to the burial-place, a few miles away, was as thick with folk as that of her own wedding more than four years gone. But no-one laughed or jested or tossed walnuts, and they all walked in a formation as severe as that of a legion. They did not walk in silence, however. The _praeficae_ , the professional mourners, led the way, piping and wailing the dirge of the _nenia_. One was dressed as Constantia, others as her ancestors, all wearing waxen _imagines_.

Behind them, Esca, Marcus, Gavo, Carantinos, a tall, lean man whom Cottia understood to be distant kin to Constantia, and another man she did not know carried Constantia on her funeral-couch. Next came Constantia’s and Aëtius’s children, bareheaded, with Aëtia holding Paulla’s hand. Aëtia wept freely, though she did not loudly lament or tear her hair as kinswomen of the dead usually did. Paulla, old enough to know her mother was gone forever, cried and fussed.

Behind them walked Bellicia, who carried the newborn babe in her arms, and Deieda and Sulia. And Cottia, holding Cai in her arms and Rhiain by the hand, Flavius trailing her. Other prosperous folk walked behind them, and still beyond seemed to be all the rest of the Downs.

Finally, they reached the burial-place. The _praeficae_ continued to wail, but no-one else spoke as the couch bearing the small body in its fine stola was set down upon the rectangular pyre. Bellicia and Sulia had washed and dressed Constantia, and plaited her long brown hair for the very last time, that she might lie for three days in the atrium of her villa. She had been rewashed and redressed one last time; her eyes had been re-opened, and a _nummus_ rested on her tongue.

Goods were set upon her pyre about her, things to accompany her to the realm of the dead. The Samian ware, a cup of wine and a bowl of food, had been purposefully cracked to loose its life-spirit, that it would not descend with her into the afterlife. The clay lamp had similarly been chipped.

All about the burial-place stood men from many villas, toga-clad under their cloaks; as did the men who served them and the men of the villages, in tunics and braccae. But they were outnumbered by women. Constantia’s girls, from wee unblossomed maidens with faces blotched from weeping to matrons with countenances of stone, all thronged about the pyre. But most were young women. Some stood with their men, some cradled a child or held its hand, some stood alone.

Many children cried or fussed. Flavius, though he would not remember Constantia much better than his sibs would, was now old enough to catch the mood of his elders; for once he did not smile or chatter joyfully but looked about him gravely. Cai slept. Rhiain raptly watched the _praeficae_ tear at their stolae to bare their breasts, then strike at them with their fists. The hired women continued to wail as Constantia’s tall relation poured out a libation of wine upon the pyre, then set grain and incense down upon the soaked wood.

He accepted a torch from someone beside him. Turning his face away from his dead kinswoman, he set her pyre alight.

The laments of the _praeficae_ rose along with the flames. Gently prompted by Bellicia, Aëtia stepped closer to the pyre and tossed onto it a glass vial with a long neck and a bulb-like body. Such vessels were said to contain mourners’ tears, but this one contained the usual fragrant unguent, whose sweet odour rose up from the fire admixed with that of the incense.

Once she could no longer see Constantia behind the flames, Cottia looked off to her right. Spying a familiar movement from across several knots of people, she caught the back of Esca’s russet head — and then it dropped from her line of sight.

She moved round to the right, passed a few of the people who stood between them. He was kneeling at the feet of a sombre, drawn-faced Ffion, at eye level with a dark-haired girl just slightly larger than Flavius. Esca touched the child’s face and said words Cottia did not catch, and the girl made a similarly inaudible reply. The solemn eyes in her pale face were wide-set and grey.

An odd catch in Cottia’s chest, neither pleasant nor painful.

She turned more to the right and walked more paces, until she found Marcus. Flavius walked up to his father and leant against his leg; Marcus’s hand dropped down upon his shoulder.

His eyes were not red as hers were, but they were heavy, and they were smudged beneath. She noted, with shock, that a line had begun to be etched across his forehead, and two or three threads of silver glinted in his night-dark curls.

He took her hand that did not hold Rhiain’s. He said nothing, nor did she, but they did not release one another until Constantia had been entirely consumed by the flames, her ashes were gathered into the alabaster urn, and the head _praefica_ spoke the word “ _Ilicit._ ”

_You may go._

_Aprilis_  
 _Anno Quinto_  
 _134 CE_

_From Imperator Caesar Traianus Hadrianus Augustus to Lucius Octavius Cornelius Publius Salvius Julianus Aemilianus the jurist, greetings. Well I remember the rawness of Britannia in winter; nonetheless I hope your sojourn there brought you rest as well as unexpected work._

_I know,_ mi Juliane _, that_ patriapotestas _forbids the children in question from taking their legacies while their father remains alive. With great pleasure, however, I myself offer an opportunity of interpreting that law in a more humane way which takes into account their father’s medical incapacitation: I decide that his children may indeed take their legacies as specified in their mother’s will._

_The moneys left to him by his wife, as well as their combined property that their mother has not left to them, shall be held in trust for him in the event he should recover. It may be drawn upon to pay for his care and the upkeep of property. Upon his death, his children will inherit it entirely._

_Marcus Flavius Aquila, a hero of the Empire twice over, surely can be entrusted with administering the children’s legacies and making decisions regarding their fosterage, as well as appointing and overseeing caretakers for their father’s villa. I therefore decide he shall be appointed their_ tutor _._

 _As for the accusations leveled against the wife of the_ procurator Augusti _Lucanus, there is no way to prove them before the law, nor is there any way to prove that Lucanus himself has acted in bad faith. He therefore cannot reasonably be punished or even reprimanded. However, closer attention shall be paid to his subsequent decisions in such matters, lest he prove to harbor avarice that hinders the fair and competent discharge of his duties._

_Farewell._

_Aestatis Solstitio_  
 _Anno Quinto_  
 _134 CE_

Two hooded figures made their way down to the clover-hollow, each with a basket on her head. One basket held the spouted pot and the sack of coals; the other held the knife and the scraper.

“I’ve heard from Briti,” Enica said as they approached the six skeps. “She sent word with a trader.”

“How fares she?” Cottia asked.

Enica shook her head. “She is hale enough, but she is miserable. The idiot. What did she expect, running off with some Durotriges lad she’d seen all of three times at market? Oh, he treats her well enough, but his mother despises her, and his sisters too, though she works hard and doesn’t complain. Or so she says. And she’s had to re-accustom herself to life in a roundhouse instead of on a villa. She’s with child now; maybe if she gives the old woman a grandson it’ll go easier for her.”

Cottia had never warmed much to the younger of her two house-servants, but she had been alarmed when Britivenda had gone missing. Of course, later, she’d been exasperated to hear that nothing had befallen the girl but love, and stupidity. She’d made her bed and would have to lie in it, but Cottia hoped it would grow more comfortable with time.

Meanwhile, she’d taken on another girl, Adira, the issue of a Syrian freedwoman and her patron. To Cottia’s appreciative surprise, Adira seemed as quick of wit as Enica was and as fast to learn as Enica had been. The two girls soon grew inseparable, in a way that Enica never had with Britivenda, and within months they were spending most of their free time with one another. The woebegone look that maturity and confidence had begun to temper in Enica’s features disappeared entirely. Cottia had not realised how much that look was a stone upon her own heart until it was gone.

And she’d taken in the wet-nurse at Constantia’s as well, a girl named Rosula, to care for Canus. A praenomen Marcus had chosen. Esca had lowered his head to conceal the glistening of his eyes. Cottia’s throat had thickened.

She and Enica set their burdens down beside the skeps. The day was growing hot already, even hotter than the Midsummer’s Day when first she’d harvested honey. She noticed a droplet of sweat trickling down Enica’s forehead as the younger woman emptied the coal-sack into the pot. Within a moment Cottia had flint and steel to hand, and then the coals were glowing.

“The galbanum,” she said. Enica reached for her own belt-pouch and emptied it into the pot. Both of them covered their noses and mouths with their free hands.

“I think I’ll watch you smoke them out,” Cottia said. A flicker of the old nervousness passed over Enica’s face, then faded as Enica grinned.

“As you wish, _domina_ ,” she said. She nestled the spout into the back of the first skep, then blew hard on the coals.

Out roared the bees, skep after skep, as Enica set the spout into each. Soon all were empty, and Cottia said, “Quickly, before they come back.”

She’d told Enica how it went many times before — leave the best combs full of honey and young; cut out the weaker and older ones — but to set one’s hand to a task requiring skill is not the same as to hear how it is done. She took the lead, and Enica’s eyes traced how Cottia’s knife moved in the thick wax. When all the older combs had been loosed into the basket, Cottia handed her the scraper and said, “Whatever remains, other than the healthy combs, add to the pile.”

As Cottia began to cut out the combs of the second skep, she looked up, once, to see the scraper moving deftly in Enica’s hand and sticky bits of wax fall in among the freed combs. She saw Enica dip a finger into a remnant of comb that Cottia had missed, brimming with honey, and bring her sweetened fingertip to her lips and taste. And she thought to herself that Enica’s expression, pleasure and accomplishment all mixed together, was as sweet to see as anything they would take from the skeps would taste.

**Author's Note:**

> I have far too many thanks and references to fit into this text box, so I have [posted my endnotes to my LiveJournal](http://island-of-reil.livejournal.com/23849.html). Comments are disabled there.
> 
> Also, I've cleaned up half a dozen bizarre misspellings that seemed to have come out of nowhere, deleted a duplicate "the", and re-added some wordspaces that had mysteriously disappeared between italicized and roman words. Sorry about that.


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